Platform Product Manager Competency Model
based on Ravi Mehta's Framework
A framework to evaluate Platform Product Managers
Platform Product Managers are Product Managers (really?) that needs to be evaluate considering product management competencies without leaving the specific technical constraints and the high complex environment they are inserted into aside.
As an Individual Contributor Platform PM, I've always struggled on having clear directions to make my development plan and by making a transition from an IC role to a manager, I've been missing having supporting materials that would help me to evaluate my direct reports abilities which would contemplate those platform specificities. That is why I decided to make this adaptation of one of the main competency model's frameworks known for product managers evaluation.
This model, adapted from Ravi Mehta's Competency Model, focuses on describing the unique aspects of Platform Product Management, while highlighting specific nuances to consider when evaluating Platform PMs' competencies.
PRODUCT EXECUTION
Product execution forms the foundation of any product management role, including platforms. It reflects a PM's ability to collaborate with engineering teams to define, build, and deliver functional, stable platforms. This domain comprises three key competencies:
Capability Specification:
Similar to feature specification, this competency involves gathering technical and functional requirements, defining the actions the capability will perform, outlining use cases, setting clear goals, and establishing a definition of done. The resulting documentation should enable the engineering team to determine how the capability will be implemented.
An effective platform specification should guide the engineering team to design technical solutions, with enough detail, to align the work with the intended outcomes.
Platform delivery:
This refers to the ability to work closely with engineering teams to iteratively and effectively transform specifications into deliverable platform capabilities for internal users. Since platform teams are highly technical, Platform PMs often require a high-to-medium level of technical knowledge in the relevant domain. While PMs are not expected to code or design architectures in depth, understanding the concepts behind technical solutions is vital for effective collaboration.
Platform Quality Assurance:
Ensuring quality involves identifying, prioritizing, and resolving technical, functional, and user experience issues that hinder internal users from deriving value from the platform.
In the platform context, quality extends to factors like the clarity of documentation, self-service usability, and platform health metrics (e.g., reliability, stability, latency, and availability). These indicators directly impact the experience of internal users and systems connected to the platform.
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
Platform PMs act as cultural ambassadors for their internal customers. They empathize with their needs, pain points, and aspirations, representing these to the broader team. Since platform PMs typically serve colleagues within the organization, it is crucial to treat internal users as customers rather than mere coworkers.
Data Fluency:
This is the ability to generate actionable insights from data, leverage those insights to achieve platform goals, and connect quantified outcomes to business value. For platform teams, the amount of internal user data can be limited, since it depends on the size of the organization and other constraints. However, it is still important for the platform PM to look into external users data, product related analytics and business metrics to be able to understand how to connect it with the value that the platform is building.
Voice of Internal Customers:
This competency involves leveraging internal user feedback—ranging from casual conversations to formal studies—to understand how users interact with the platform and to make informed decisions and drive meaningful outcomes for the business. Even when internal customers are close to the team, conducting user research, surveys, interviews, or direct observations remains essential. Establishing efficient mechanisms for users to provide ideas, suggestions, and feedback without overloading the team's operations is another important PM's responsibility.
Developer Experience:
We can think about the user experience as the doorway to all of the value your platform creates for people. Developer experience encompasses all interactions between engineers and the organization's tools, processes, systems, and platforms.
For Platform Engineering, it would also consider the tools and technical stack choices until the creation of processes and workflows that enable the engineering team to deliver the end-user product. The Platform PM needs to be aware that a poor developer experience with the platform can lead to low performance and low organizational effectiveness impacting the business and entire organization.
The ability to work close to the engineering team to translate developers' needs into an easy-to-use and delightful experience with platform touch points (APIs, documentation, self-service interfaces) is extremely important.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
Richard Rumelt defines strategy as "a coherent set of analysis, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to challenges." Defining strategy for platforms is not a common competency since some companies still undervalue it, putting the customer-facing product strategy as the mainstream. However, to be able to connect the dots between business/product strategy and the value that a platform adds on this equation, plus inspire and engage a platform team to work on what is prioritized is extremely important to develop a solid platform strategy through the following capabilities.
Business Outcome Ownership:
It is the ability to drive meaningful outcomes by connecting platform outputs to the goals & objectives that are important for the product teams and the company. Great platform work is not just about solving technical issues or paying technical debts, It's about delivering valuable business outcomes, even indirectly.
The word “ownership” is intentionally used to give the Platform PM the responsibility to find those connections between platform outputs and product/business outcomes, even when it is difficult to measure.
Platform Vision and Roadmapping:
It is the ability to define an overall vision for the platform area that connects to team and company strategy and to define a clear roadmap of prioritized capabilities and initiatives that deliver against that vision in a holistic way. The Platform roadmap is part of an ecosystem, and it usually needs to be ahead (the time frame depends on the organization's velocity) of the product roadmap, since the capabilities built by the platform should enable the scale and evolution of the user-facing products.
Another important competency is the ability to articulate and adapt the platform roadmap as new users demands arise because of product pivots or business needs.
Strategic Impact:
Strategic Impact is the ability to understand and contribute to the overall business strategy. It means bringing strategy to fruition through consistent delivery of business outcomes.
While business outcome ownership focuses on individual initiatives, strategic impact reflects the cumulative effect of those efforts on company scale and long-term objectives, since they are the most important purposes of building platforms in the first place.
INFLUENCING PEOPLE
The Platform PM should be a connective tissue within the organization, specially because (usually) they are the only “non-technical” person in the team, that can dedicate time and effort to build relationships with peers, internal users, stakeholders and leadership.
Stakeholders Management:
It is the ability to proactively identify stakeholders impacted by the PM's area of ownership and then work with those stakeholders to factor their requirements into good platform decisions.
For Platform PMs, this ability is specially important since most of the platform teams are horizontal an organization, which means that the PM has interface with many different teams and kinds of stakeholders to keep them aligned throughout the same goal to deliver platform value.
Foster collaboration and co-creation of platform solutions with those stakeholders is also essential for platform PMs, since it helps them to build a closer relationship to internal clients and influence product decisions towards platform evolution.
Team Leadership:
Team Leadership is the ability to manage and mentor direct reports with the goal of enabling them to successfully deliver on their product areas, continuously improve against these competencies, deliver meaningful business outcomes, and achieve their career objectives.
In platform context, it is not common that PMs would lead other roles such as engineers. However, they have to build the muscle to lead those teams through influence, not authority.
Managing Up:
It refers to the ability to leverage senior managers and executives in the organization to help achieve goals, deliver meaningful business outcomes, and positively influence the strategic direction of the PM's team and company overall.
On Platform Product Management, this scope also includes the ability to translate complex technical contexts into executive and business language to better communicate and influence strategic decisions for the platform and be able to get the leadership support needed to accomplish platform goals.
What's next?
This article contemplates only the description on how each known PM's competency should be adapted to evaluate a Platform Product Managers. The original Ravi Mehta's framework and guide also provides a Product Competency Matrix with detailed expectations for each competency at every level of a typical product organization and a Worksheet that people could use to apply it in a career development plan. Because Platform PMs levels highly depend on the company's context and platform maturity level, I recommend that you consult the original guide to follow up with those steps.