AMA: Mezmo Sr. Director, Product Management, Ashka Vakil on Platform Product Management

Aligning roadmaps for product managers on individual products with the broader platform requires a collaborative approach. It is critical to establish overarching strategy and platform goals that are aligned with the company's business objectives and extremely important to understand clearly each product's goals and asks from the platform. Once the platform goals and asks from individual products are established, use a prioritization framework to define the priority. Use shared prioritization fr ...Read More

Platform product managers are responsible for building a set of services and capabilities that are used by customers (internal or external) to build products or solutions. Operating systems like iOS and Android, Mobile app stores like Google Play, and Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP are some examples of platforms that typically platform product managers will be responsible for. Platform PMs essentially build foundational layers or capabilities that help internal teams or external compan ...Read More

Platform PM is a specialized role that requires technical chops and soft skills to work with external and internal customers and stakeholders while being able to go deep in the weeds but also think about the big picture of what the platform can do. As a result, there are a lot of dimensions on which success can be measured. The two main dimensions for measuring success are adoption and technical excellence. Adoption - how is the platform being adopted, how many teams are utilizing the platform, ...Read More

Given platform product managers are not directly building an application or a tool or a solution for a single use case, the most challenging aspect of being a platform product manager is multiple stakeholder management. This multiple-stakeholder management requires platform PMs to have certain skills to be successful. Platform PM has to juggle individual stakeholders' product needs with platform-level goals. Platform PMs need to maintain a delicate balance between enabling individual product suc ...Read More