How do you identify the highest impact projects on a platform team?

Impact is typically measured by customer and business value that product/project brings in. First step is to understand customer scenarios/workflows and associated pain-points and needs. Combine that with business opportunity of that investment, also having a close eye on the market and compete landscape. Finally, use rigorous prioritization to focus on highest ROI - take into account both customer/business value as well as associated cost to deliver. This is no different from a typical Product team. A key focus on platform team should be to invest in durable, long-lasting capabilities that will benefit many customer as opposed to focusing on short-term wins for a select set of customers (this can result in custom solutions that become hard to generalize in future).

First, I start with defining the impact. In some cases, the business could benefit from cost savings, better SLAs, or faster time to market for new products and features. It all depends on the business and market conditions, so aligning with your executive team is the first thing I'd do.

Next, I focus on capturing, analyzing, and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data inputs. Personally, I like to meet key stakeholders (PM/EM leads who lead other pillars) to understand their pain points and needs better.

With these inputs, I usually generate two artifacts: (I) a platform strategy document outlining how the work we do aligns with business and market signals (II) a shared backlog among teams with RICE scores to help calibrate priority among different types of initiatives.

Before thinking about the possible solutions/features we could build it is important to make sure that the problem is the right one to be focused on right now. There may be times that the biggest problems are just not solvable right now, or that the known best solution would take more time than customers are willing to wait for any solution even the best one.

The best way I have found to balance this need between big long term improvements and small quick wins for the customers with with a RICE score. You can search the internet to get more information and I will not go into a primer here but will call out some traps I have run into when setting up initial RICE scoring and keeping it up to date.

• Make sure you consider the timeframe of the scores. For reach consider a set timeframe of 3 to 6 months after implementation what is the possible reach, not total possible reach ever.

• For platform teams consider standardizing on the end user reach and avoid the temptation to say "all our users would benefit". If a team with 1M Monthly Active Users is asking for an improvement for a particular user segment that is only 10K then the reach is 10K not 1M.

• Tie the impact to your overall goals. If your goal for the year is to speed up the response time of the platform then consider measuring that as the impact. Projects that have a minimal impact or would slow down the platform have lower impact scores.

• The hardest part is the estimating effort. Think really hard about the projects and encourage your team to do the same. Compare and Contrast projects and debate if two things that deliver different impact would really take the same amount of time.

• Do not be afraid to update scores when you learn more. If you have low confidence about something figure out how you can gain some amount of greater confidence quickly but know that you will never get to 100% and that is ok.

With that data in hand you can make an informed decision about which projects get you a fast ROI and move the platform towards your longer term goals.