Product Management roles are sometimes broken down into 4 specializations: Core, Platform, Growth, and Innovation (this great post from Reforge dives deeper into each area).
For most of my career, I’ve served as an innovation PM / zero-to-one PM, helping organizations launch new products and features from ideation through product-market fit. As I’ve spent more time launching new products, it’s helped me refine my own theory of innovation, and it’s evolved towards a greater emphasis on Platform as a driver of innovation.
I like to think of the model as small bets (skirmishes) along an established frontier.
When I reflect about how our teams innovate, it’s often about taking a familiar product or service and delivering it in a new way, or extending the capability to do one more thing, or streamlining an existing behavior through automation.
Your current frontier represents the things your organization has already validated and operationalized. You extend this frontier by pushing this further into new territory, initially through scouting (product discovery) and then through measured skirmishes (experiments, MVPs, Livable Houses, v1s).
Some of these bets don’t work out. There wasn’t enough demand. Your solution wasn’t strong enough. We didn’t reach the right customer. The timing was off. etc.
Many people think of innovation as something that extends far beyond the frontier, a long column extending far beyond your classic product, or paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines. If you innovate in this way, you are able to release features faster that are more modern, capable, or “innovative,” but you also expose significant compounding risks and can walk away without really understanding why something failed (or why it worked). There are too many variables being tested at once, without establishing a firm ground of validated assumptions.
Returning to Platform Product Management.
Think of the work you do in improving the platform as building up greater resources and strength along your current frontier. It’s an investment in infrastructure. It might be putting together a great public APIs for a core service. It might be exposing an easy-to-use event stream for other domains to subscribe to. It might be a reusable front-end component that let you embed a user profile widget inside any new feature.
All of these things make it easier for the Innovation PMs and the teams advancing beyond the frontier to iterate faster, make smaller bets, and spend less time building their own prerequisites to launching new features and products.
So many of the amazing ideas I’ve heard over the past decade have fizzled out because the team driving the innovation was blocked by a lack of foundational (platform) capabilities that would bring their new ideas to life. Or we were able to get a first version into the wild, but it didn’t have enough fortification to survive on its own, and the feature was stranded beyond the frontier (a problem I dive into further here).
When your frontier is not well fortified, it increases the minimum size of new bets and limits the types of innovations you can pursue. For a larger established software business, your investment in a great platform is an investment in your ability to innovate quickly without excessive risk.
One of the best tools I’ve encountered to teach this kind of thinking is Wardley Mapping. It’s based on the concept of how you combine the interlocking capabilities of your organization together to address a customer use case / opportunity.
Wardley Mapping helps you deconstruct your internal value chain and think about the investments you make in the core capabilities of your business.
For a large organization, this interplay between platform and innovation is sometimes counterintuitive. We sometimes think of platform work as the unsexy plumbing, slow and methodical, investing in “the old stuff.” We think of innovation as a speed boat, operating it a different way.
And while we do need to be able to launch these speed boats with a different process than our core business, they tend to have a small gas tank and no armor, so they can’t venture too far beyond the mothership without getting stranded, and we don’t want them to carry all their own supplies for a long duration because it will slow them down.
Okay, I’ve probably exhausted this extended metaphor beyond its terms of use, but I hope this has helped you think of your investments in platform in a new light. For product leaders looking at their portfolio and resource allocation for next year, I encourage you to think about the kind of platform investments that create a lot of leverage across many different vectors of innovation in parallel. You can map out these investments on a Wardley Map to draw a direct connection between your platform work and the innovation vectors at the edges of your frontier.