Earlier this year, I collaborated with Waqas Sheikh (of Waqas’s Musings) to write an essay on Demystifying Platform Product Management. The job of platform PMs can be confusing both for the individual PM and their stakeholders, and we wanted to equip folks with more perspective. The article generated a lot of questions, which I’ll be answering via a series of posts: in today’s edition I’ll talk about defining metrics for platform products without falling for some common myths. Check out additional discussion on this topic on LinkedIn.
We constantly talk about how all product investments *should* have ROI, but what’s less talked about is that not all product ideas pan out – some have zero ROI. Platform investments are big bets, and big bets sometimes have a big failure to ROI. Just like feature releases aren’t guaranteed adoption, new behind-the-scenes capabilities fail to have impact one degree removed.
Actually, some metrics require quarters (or years) to prove out. The best you can do in the immediate-term is to deconstruct the metric into a set of leading indicators and gauge whether they are moving. On some level, platform investments are about conviction on a future state of the world that can’t be quantified yet. In fact, orienting on metrics that are easy to measure today can send you down the wrong path in the future.
No, that actually stifles discovery. What can and should be agreed on early is the idea that a platform bet should have a measurable outcome, along with some hypotheses on what the right metric might be. But as the investment matures and the thinking evolves, the right metric will emerge. Often, telling the qualitative story on the pain you hope to solve leads to customers / stakeholders giving you ideas on how to measure the true value.
It’s actually OK to share metrics ownership across R&D and GTM functions; you should think of the product as one lever to moving a metric, but non-user-facing efforts across engineering, design, data, marketing, sales, and success can drive metrics impact as well. And cross-functional ownership is a great way to ensure everyone has skin in the game vs over-indexing on product changes as a silver bullet.
On the contrary, platform bets are sometimes the only way to move big boulders like pricing and profitability. In the age of AI-driven development, feature parity and capability commoditization will happen faster than ever. So platform-level investments that lead to network effects, ecosystem moats, architectural differentiation, development velocity, and operational efficiency might end up as your most important investments.
The metrics that platform products influence (reliability, performance, security, velocity, costs) are inherently one degree removed from the KPIs that leaders want to discuss (user growth, revenue retention, logo count, market share) – this has the side effect of requiring some mental gymnastics to correlate platform metrics to business outcomes. But just because you have to think a little harder to understand the value doesn’t make it less valuable.
This is true, they never directly ask in advance – but they’ll definitely scream about it if there’s an issue. Platform capabilities are the ones no one complains about until it’s a firedrill; things like service uptime, application performance, UX debt, onboarding costs are vitamins in a world obsessed with painkillers. But if you want your product to have a long life, you’ve got to take your vitamins.
Hopefully this mental model helps platform PMs counter myths that derail their products. If you’d like discuss this post live with me, you can continue the conversation with my digital clone / second brain LemonAid.
As always, I’d also love to hear from readers about their lessons learned around platform product metrics – please chime in via comments👇 or join the chat via the Substack app.
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further reading / references
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I’ve written and spoken about the importance of connecting product work to business outcomes by cultivating a revenue mindset for PMs – for premium subscribers there is also a video deep dive on applying my metrics ladder framework in practice
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if you feel your platform team hasn’t fallen into a trap and set the wrong metrics, check out Metrics Malfunction to diagnose the root cause and unwind
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Product Onions is an all-too-real story of how platform metrics get mishandled
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If you’re early in your platform thinking, check out Why Platform-ify? and Platform Plays to understand the value proposition and different flavors
childish drawing / interpretation
