Unlock the Power of Deal Management Platform for Product Management

How to create outlook signature

all right let's get started thank you all for joining today um this talk is about the internal platform product manager um this is a type of PM that is really gaining a lot in popularity across tech companies a PM that's building platforms or internal products for your company's internal users now let's learn more about why this is um such a in demand role at the moment moment uh my name is lamus I am a PM working at WISE in London in platform I been working in the platform as a product space let's say for the last five or six years in Seattle in the US before and I'm from Germany originally so yeah happy to be here today let's dig into it um first topic is what actually is an internal platform right so if we want to learn more about about the role we have to understand the product first secondly you want to understand why we need a PM for intern platforms spoiler that not every company actually has a PM on those platform products um and lastly we look at what it takes to be successful in this role now for this last point I actually interviewed about 16 platform PMS in the industry and ask them for their experience all right starting with the first point now what is an internal platform so when I say platform in this talk what I mean is this and this and this and you get the point um there are diff there are various kinds of internal platforms I would say some of those terms on here are probably synonyms um some are more bit more distinct now what do they all have in common well in common is the user right all of those platforms are built for the internal user typically that that's your your company's um Engineers um and those Engineers have the job to generate value for your end customers right so the engineers they are building features evolving your product running your product and so on and generating Val you for your customers now in today's um worlds there's actually a lot on the engineers plate uh if you know the devops model especially right Engineers have a lot to do they have to plan their work they have to implement features code they have to test release they have to maintain you know remove security issues they are 24/7 on call have to make sure it's always running and healthy it's a lot that they have to to take care of um besides this you also have more and more complexity coming from the ecosystem and more and more pressure right from from the business and from end customers so you have um pressure to reduce time to Market you know we have to get out features fast learn quickly we also have to buy have to have to build highly available products so you cannot be you know unavailable if you're Amazon or Facebook um it has to be always available you also have to have um highly performant um products so you talking about you know milliseconds of response and not you know multiple seconds you also have to be very aware of regulations compliance security risks that you have to own as engineers and lastly you have to do all of this being very mindful about cost and not waste right money and have to build the product in a scalable way so it cost don't explode right if you generate more and more traffic and more and more customers now you don't have only one engineer you typically have hundreds maybe a thousands Engineers right you have maybe hundreds of engineering teams in your company and all of those teams have to do all of those tasks and they have to do all of this while meeting all of those requirements that we mentioned earlier right well that is a lot to take care of now internal platforms really have buil have been built as a response to that right platform products are providing value to the internal users so they're helping the internal users to generate value faster and they have been built to abstruct away complexity and make jobs to be done for the engineers much easier so we're not saying that we are going to um plan or code on test for the engineers right this is still their job but we are providing all of those as internal capabilities or products and making this much easier so we providing testing as a product releasing as a product and so on and they can then use this to get their job done faster and generate value faster now if I talk about customers in here what I mean as platform PM is the internal users typically the engineers right the product is the internal platform and the outcome is yes it's going to be revenue and so on of the company ultimately but that's more secondary right the immediate outcome that we care about is time to Market availability performance and so on right risk cost we're trying to help Engineers to achieve all of this right and we're trying to enable them there's also one more thing that's important is that we try to provide a great developer experience to our Engineers the internal customers right this is not just an nice to have in these days well you have to have a great experience for developers otherwise you won't keep the best people um and yeah you're going to going to lose um talent that is also a massive Trend right now in the industry so um this is a product talk not platform talk so but I have to go kind of one step further here um now this is how platforms typically look when you kind of look a bit more internally into how they're built right so typically what you have is that your your product um your um your company's product right is running somewhere typically in the clouds Amazon or you know Google or whatever and the cloud provider provides the fundamental like storage um compute networking and so on to run your application now Ty typically what you have as the first layer of internal platform team are core infrastructure or foundational platform teams now those teams provide the cloud providers yeah if you want so services in a very tailored way towards your customer your company's needs right so they provide acccess management governance maybe um terraform scripts to generate um sources in the cloud and they also ask questions like do we have to have a you know data center in Ireland or Frankfurt and so on based on your company's needs now on the top of this you're going to have platform teams that are more developer enabling and are much more um know helping much more with the day-to-day work of developers so here may be things like delivery tooling how do developers get a change out from local machine to production right might be things like reliability engineering how do we help Engineers to build you know reliable services and you also have things like um you know data platforms data products machine learning analytics and so on helping teams to you know build models um monitor models and so on now all of those platforms are provided as a compelling internal product to our Engineers data scientists analysts and so on V are services tools knowledge support um and so on okay um now why do you care about this well it turns out that um what we mentioned earlier like time to Market um reliability and so on now those are all very important properties right to have today in today's um time as a company and investing in those capabilities such as delivery of software operational performance and so on generates a competitive Advantage for your company so Gartner here is a quote says that well most companies are going to establish an platform team or you know internal platform um by by 26 they say here and there is a nice read here um state of devops report um where they explain how those you know capabilities that we mentioned earlier help your company um being more successful so there's a strong correlation between software performance and liability and so on and your company's success all right so now we know what the platform is what the product is now why a PM for it well um maybe you've heard of thought Works before that's a company that works with you know many other companies and tries to help them give guidance consult them and so on and they're publish a a tech radar um I think twice a year or so where they um share with with us um what they have seen working at other companies and what they um you know recommend us to look at adopt trial assess and so on now this is the one from April 23 and the number one thing they um yeah tell you to adopt is applying product management to internal platforms okay um so this is working this model and a lot of companies out there but we want to just listen to to firworks we also want to think for ourselves a little bit right so if you think about an internal platform what you have is a product that we provide to customers to achieve an outcome right if you're a PM that should sound familiar to you right um there is of course a few differences here to traditional PM let's say right so your customers are your colleagues so they're internal users you have also a captive customer base well there can't go anywhere there's no expansion or anything like that right and lastly customers typically are also um you know engineers and they have strong opinions about the product themselves and and and how you should build it and so on now the product the you know the platform itself can be a bit hard to Define if you think about the the the engineers job to deliver features now this may include multiple tools in the developer Journey right now what's the product it's the product the tool it's product the journey so it's not as obvious also those internal platforms are not always optional to use um sometimes um they they have to be used right if there's only let's say if there's kubernetes for instance well it might be it might not be reasonable to use something else so if it's not optional um then is it still a product that's the question right and they are also often emission critical meaning that well if the foundational layers are not available your whole company will stop working really now the outcome here is of course much more indirect ask yourself if we improve our you know uh our development experience then what's the impact on this of this on Revenue if we improve you know develop happiness how will this help us to generate more Revenue it is not as as easy right to to um link this together it's also hard to quantify platform outcome in in you know Financial measures and you also have a delayed return uh that means that you invest in you know infrastructure or tooling but you have to get adoption first and so on before you see a real return of that but if you think about the you know if if you are building an internal platform what are some things you may want to ask yourself you we saw earlier that this is a massive competitive Vantage right if you don't invest in internal platforms you're risking to fall back with time to Market with reliability you know really with your end customers expectations and you really have to invest to stay competitive um that means that is an important thing to think about right so if you're building the internal platform you may want understand well how do we know that what we are building is actually having an impact like how do we know that right um also how do we know that our customers the engineers are actually productive and what we're building is usable and they're they're happy right um typically you also have as always right you have more ideas and you have time so the question might be so what should we build first should we invest in reliability or in delivery speed not obvious this question right this answer also you may want to ask yourself how can we as platform teams best support our company Mission or strategy um at this current point in time right also how are we doing are we having a good products are we are having are we having great tools right what are others doing out there now all of those questions are really product questions I'm not saying that well this can't be answered by you know Engineers or or or or leaders um but to answer those questions now this is really a a full-time job and probably it's a full-time job the platform team so you might as well have a PM right that has um methods Frameworks in place to answer those those those questions very like structured and scientifically now what are some insights in KP I set we look at as platform PMS or platform as a product well I said earlier right time to Market delivery speed and so on so one of the big outcomes for us is our engineering productivity how fast can we onboard new Engineers how fast can we deliver new features how happy are our developers right so we weely on rely a lot on surveys interviews and so on to generate um insights and make improvements stability risk cost are all you know different kinds of kpis we look at there's a nice block post here you can read um that tells you a bit more about how wise is is um doing this so lastly let's look at if you are a platform PM or want to become one right what uh it takes to uh yeah be a good pm and to succeed in this in this role so for this last point I said earlier I talked to um 16 platform PMS in the industry from the US Europe UK and so on um Spotify wi BBC just e and so on a lot of companies and I asked them three questions um well what do you think makes this job challenging um what's maybe different than another PM PM rule what do you like most about it what do you enjoy most and what does it take to succeed now what's the ideal person uh for this role so starting with the challenges now this was probably the single the single most point that kind of was brought up in interviews one of your biggest challenges as a PM is to measure the impact of your work it is not obvious how to measure impact and product success defining kpis for things like kubernetes or or terraform or even like delivery tooling like cicd and so on it is not an obvious thing to do so that's a big challenge in our in our domain it's it's also hard to quantify whatever we do in platform in financial terms in pounds how do you translate um you know develop experience into pounds that is not straightforward and lastly a lot um of your work will be explaining platform value to non-technical stakeholders so you have to constantly um be mindful that a lot of people in your company won't understand what you really doing right so you have to invest a lot in explaining the value and make the business case for platform Investments all right second Point mentioned was kind of being a bit isolated um and lack of support So I said earlier this is a kind of an emerging role it's becoming very popular in the industry at the moment but there are a lot of things we don't know about it yet right it's a bit of unoted crown so as a PM in this role you have to explore a lot yourself now what are PM methods I can use um how about user research um what makes Engineers different as customers so a lot of things that we haven't figured out yet right so um you a lot on your own have to figure out and pave the path you also have to work a lot on creating trust for the PM role a lot of platform teams that you work with you might be their first pm right so we know what what a PM is and they may also be critical about the role you also have to do a lot of evangelizing around product thinking with imp platform teams to get that mindset out there Discovery user research question assumptions and so on right you don't typically have a lot of supporting functions as a PM in platform so typically what you have in PM roles is you have ux design research Analytics and so on right if you're a PM platform you don't that right you typically have to be a full stack so you have to design yourself you have to do interviews research analytics it's a lot that you have on your on your plate as a platform PM you also have a lack of data to understand your customers's behavior that means that we don't have kind of nice funnels that we can can use or understand how Engineers are you know you don't want to be the big brother right so you rely a lot on interviews and surveys to get your insights and lastly it can feel a bit disconnected from the product work because even a lot of PMS don't know what you're doing as platform PM right so you have to approach them in a way you have to explain them what the PM does in this role and um yeah so on this last Point actually uh I found interesting that I asked those 16 platform PMS um tell me your reporting line do you report into the CTO or the CPO Well turns out that most platform PMS report into the CTO right so it is very much rolled in between the two worlds you are a PM but you're very engineering focused last challenge that was brought up um or the last biggest one the top three here only right is it is a technical domain right and it is really difficult to understand your products and your your users we're talking about like know building a highly available system um you know database systems it is about like service mesh it is a lot of things that are Technical and you have to understand it's very steep learning curve also your engineers are um your customers technical user base it is very difficult to keep up with the ecosystem so here you have a picture of the cloud native l ape zooming in on databases only right now all of those are infrastructure tools and so on that you can use in your company as part of your internal platform offering but how do you know which of them are relevant for you right you have to really keep up with the industry which is incredibly difficult because a lot is changing in the ecosystem and you are not an expert of your own product now that's sounds a bit stupid but it is actually true right you have to accept in a way that your platform Engineers that you work with and your engineers your customers may know your products and how it works internally better than you right so you bring much more the insights and and and and um you know user interviews um quantifying impact thinkinking what sizing and so on to the table and lastly um you have a lot of context switching in this role you this is actually a nice uh bit of I guess an Insider Insider joke um you have Dora Dora stands for multiple things these days it stands for doram metrics devops research assessment metrics such as mentioned earlier the kpis like lead time time to um come back from incidents and so on those are very engineering focused metrics but you also have Dora meaning op um operational resilience act right right so a compliance regulation that we have to comply to showing that we are resilient now you as platform PM have to understand both you have to understand engineers and their metrics and compliance risk regulations so it is incredibly broad scope that you have to um take care of so now the happy side of things um what do people enjoy most about the role what they really like about this the number one thing mentioned here was autonomy and and freedom so because you're a bit decoupled from the Direct Customer like company in our Revenue um you have almost no direction from from the overall company strategy right so you can really figure out everything yourself you have a lot of freedom and autonomy to Define your strategy Vision objectives and figure out how to shape those so you achieve the company's Mission you also have a lot more freedom to think long term so typically in platform we don't think quarterly right we think about year two year three year 5 year Horizon how can we enable our company's growth what's coming up what are the big trends in the industry right so much more freedom there as well and there's less scrutiny on goto market now obviously if you're delivering products for internal users well um legal marketing might not care about this that much right so you have much more freedom to kind of um try out things and and release stuff um and yeah this one also a big a big uh benefit is you have your customers sitting next to you literally in the office right so the customer proximity was a bit benefit that was brought up from from interviews people really like that there was one quote here from somebody who said um you can do as much research as you have capacity I think that's that's really much very much true and you can also Al feel your impact so if you improve developers lives can literally see their smile right you can literally see them um you know being happier or or um you know thank you for it in the office I think it's it's it's actually really nice and your customers are the engineers that means that typically your customers are very smart um they're really great to work with and people love that about the job and and lastly you have this really Brad set of stakeholders so you as part from PM talk to I mean head of risk ciso um CTO CPO so you have a really really wide set of um people to interact with in the company because you have such a foundational offering and lastly people also like this about the job um it is it's novelty and also the difficulty really it comes with the job right and people really like that you understand how things work under the hood so you start form PM really understand how your product is built from the crown up right from infrastructure um to architecture uh and so on right so the whole picture you understand how it works also you have to constantly learn new things you said earlier right there was the CL landscape so you have to learn about knowy ecosystem but also what compliance risk so it's it's a challenge but it's also so really really rewarding to just stay in touch and keep on top of all those changes that happening right now um this was also put up as a challenge but it's also people also we like this part the Uncharted crowns right so a lot is yet to be figured out as platform PM quantifying impact right um researching and so on comparing companies a lot of things we don't know about yet and we have to explore ourselves and lastly yes it is complex but if you understand it you can have a massive impact right so you can use technology and have a huge compounding Ina if you can just save let's say five minutes per developer per week if you do the math over a year you're going to have a massive impact and help the company right accelerate their road map for instance all right and then lastly summarize more or less what it takes in the this job something I get often asked in this as this um you know in this role is do you have to be technical typically I would say that platform PMS have that title technical PM so I asked um those 16 people that are interviewed um about their background and Well turns out that actually most of them said no no technical background um some said a third said you know kind of is and the third said yes so I would say that to get the job not a requirement but you have to of course on the job be willing and be motivated to learn about um you know technology and and upskill and learn very fast about your product so summarizing it what does it take well you have to have an intrinsic motivation right in this job you have to really love what you're doing um without getting constant feedback and rewards right I think somebody said here you can't always be a striker you have to be really curious about the tank and about how things work internally and you have to be a strong Storyteller and Communicator so you have to understand the business and Engineering translate engineering um problems and impact into business and the other way around right you have to love to work with Engineers your customers and love learning new things all the time and lastly you have to be really humble and have to have a thick skin I can confirm that one right um it can be tough in the role a platform PM is a new role people don't maybe know the PM value needs lot of evangelizing so you might get setbacks and so on you have to be really um you know you have to have a thick skin and and and be humble as as a PM in platform I think someone from the people I talked to said this it is really for a PM that wants a challenge okay that's it thank you so much for being here um I want to thank the people that talk to me um to prepare for this talk um thank you so much for making the time and yeah if you want to um find me on LinkedIn here's my my profile happy to connect thank you so much [Music] sh