How do you align roadmaps for product managers on individual products with the broader platform?

Alignment can be a challenge for platform product managers since you usually have more than the average number of internal stakeholders and increased cross-team dependencies to get your work done. At best you have the potential to have a large scale impact, at worst your projects get blocked by another team. That’s why it’s critical to gain alignment across the broader platform. When striving for cross-team alignment, I always tell my teams to think in ‘spheres of influence:’ Start with your imm ...Read More

If you are referring to individual products using capabilities from broader platform, I would categorize those products are target customer scenarios that the platform enables. As you come up with the roadmap for your platform, you need to work closely with all those scenario owners / customers and align your roadmap to enable those scenarios to succeed. While you decide on platform capabilities based on deep understanding of customer scenarios, if you align the execution of your roadmap with th ...Read More

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

Hopefully there are some shared goals and a company or product vision to align your work to and if not you may need to write your own vision for the platform. For example if you were working on a platform that was driving a patient care portal with a 5 year vision to connect users to providers that answer questions within 5 minutes you probably would not focus on a request to integrate with fitness scheduling software but instead focus on how do we build the communication tools that will provide ...Read More

Aligning roadmaps for individual products with the broader platform is crucial for ensuring coherence, efficiency, and synergy across different aspects of the product ecosystem. Here are a few pointers: Understand the Platform Vision: Begin by understanding the overarching vision and goals of the platform. What is the purpose of the platform, and how do the individual products contribute to that vision? This understanding provides the context for aligning the roadmaps. Identify Key Themes and In ...Read More

Build with, not for them. Building 0 → 1: From my experience, a new "Platform capability" that evolves behind a key initiative has a much better chance of creating leverage and driving larger organizational impact. This requires a closely integrated or even embedded team placement with a broader alignment on key outcomes. Building 1 → N: this is an area where you'd often experience a lack of internal buy-in as each team is juggling their own set of priorities. Here, I suggest starting by choosin ...Read More

How I actually approach alignment: Get upstream Platform PMs need to be in planning cycles early quarterly roadmap reviews, annual planning, OKR-setting. If you're only showing up when there's a conflict, you've already lost. Make the platform the path of least resistance If adopting your platform abstraction is genuinely faster than building from scratch, product PMs will choose it without being asked.  Explicit dependency and adoption mapping Every quarter I maintain a simple map: which platfo ...Read More