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1. © 2017 Pegasystems, Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
Product Management for Enterprise-
grade Platforms
Product Camp 2019
Chetan Chaudhari
Senior Product Manager, Data Engine – Core platform
Pegasystems

2. What we’ll discuss
Where’s the PM’s place in the value chain?
What and how you deliver value?
What Stakeholders, customers, constituencies you serve?
How you get requirements? And prioritize them into your roadmap?
What kind of skills do you need to be successful?
What kind of documentation do you need to deliver?
Differences
Product versus Platform Small B2C versus large company
Focus is on back-end aspects of the platform, and not front-end

3. What is a platform?
Platform is a software that provides basic building blocks that a product or
application can use to provide a solution to end-users
APIs, microservices, services, frameworks, components
Products could be by the same company or 3rd party/ other companies
Not considering networking platforms that simply bring together
producers and consumers
Product2 Product3Product1
End-user

4. What is a enterprise-grade?
Software used by large companies/enterprises for attracting, signing up,
engaging, retaining, supporting, and monetizing a customer.
• Sales automation, marketing automation, CRM
• Customer support, call center
• Engaging customer, offering more services
• Customer workflows, customer portals
Every enterprise product/platform is B2B, but not other way round
• Products that are used for businesses for internal operations are simply B2B
• For example, collaboration software like Slack; recruiting software; office-
productivity software like MS Office, gsuite; video-conferencing software like
Webex, GoToMeeting (mostly) are B2B, but not enterprise products
Large
company

5. Your place in the value chain
End-user
PM
End-user
Product Platform
Product2 Product3 Product4 Product5Product1
PM
Platform
Product
Service1 Service2 Service3 Service4
Core1 Core2
Area1 Area2 Area3
Value
Product PM is delivering
value directly to the end-user
Platform PM is delivering value to the end-user
through a few layers

6. Stakeholders, customers, constituencies you serve
End-user
Product2 Product3 Product4
Product1 PM &
developers
You
Platform
Service1 Service2 Service3 Service4
Core1 Core2
Product5 PM &
developers
Requirements
Platform PM is a few levels from the end-user.
Immediate customers may be developers and PMs inside the platform.
Customers include the developers and PMs of applications/solutions.
More number of
stakeholders!

7. Stakeholders, customers, constituencies: Enterprise platform
Product1 PM &
developers
You
Platform
Service1 Service2 Service3 Service4
Core1 Core2
Requirements End-user
Solution consultants System integrators
Solution architects
System architects
Customer support
L1 and L2
Cloud support
Cloud Engineering
Even more
stakeholders!

8. Requirements: Sources
Sources of requirements
• End-user of any application or solution (any or multiple personas)
• PM or developers of applications or solutions
• PM or developers higher in the value chain
End-user
Product2
You
Service2
Platform
Sources for a requirement – enterprise platform
• Solution architects, consultants, system architects may sub for end-user
• System integrators – 3rd party IT vendors – partners
• Employed by clients to implement a solution
• Often more knowledgeable than client’s employees
• Various flavors of customer support
• Can have different sets of requirements
Solutioning, integrators

9. Requirements: Use cases and stakeholders
Use cases
• Product P1 or service S1 may request a feature
• But you need to consider use cases for P2, P3, etc. and S2, S3 etc. if the change impacts their work flows
• So you have a lot more use cases to consider
Stakeholders for a requirement
• Need to listen to stakeholders for not just the originating use cases, but also for the impacted uses cases
• You need substantially more time to finalize the requirements
• Increases risk if you miss out on listening to any one

10. Roadmap: Requirements & Prioritization
Internal customers
• You can collaborate with them more easily as compared to external customers
• The lower you’re in the value chain, the more internal customers you have
How to prioritize
• Who’s the most important stakeholder/customer you have
• The immediately higher internal team/PM/developers ?
• End-user ?
• Where is it to create biggest impact?
• Deliver a feature used by most products but less end-users?
• Deliver a feature used by most end-user but less products?

11. Requirements: Enterprise platform implications
Large company issues
• There are a lot of teams..
• You may need to collaborate with stakeholders in many teams in divisions you don’t even know exist
• Team/organization structure keeps changing
• Your boss/his boss may not point you easily to stakeholders you need to connect
• You’ve to find corporate tools/ knowledge management tools
• to navigate the complex hierarchy
• find out team structures
• Figure out areas of expertise, prior work of teams
• You may need multiple tools to synthesize information

12. Solutioning and Delivery
Timeline Implications of being away from the end-user
• When a feature needs to be delivered, every one else may be dependent on you
• Your changes would flows up to the end-user
• So you need to deliver fast and unblock others
• Pressure is high on the team to deliver
• There may be bigger time lag between you delivering a feature and it getting used by end-users
• Less so in some cases
Large company Implications
• You need to investigate more to find out if similar functionality or reusable functionality exists somewhere
• People around you, even long timers, may know only part of the platform
Enterprise implications
• You need to see if solutioning teams have any workaround created that you can leverage or learn from

13. What do you deliver
Basic building blocks for products, applications and solutions
• APIs
• REST, SOAP etc.
• Parameters, return values
• Microservices
• “Do one thing and do it well”
• Perform a specific task like authentication
• Each microservice has it’s own datastore
• Provide a few APIs

14. What do you deliver: Microservices

15. What do you deliver: Frameworks and services
Framework or services
• An elaborate functionality
• Provides configuration/set up
• Initialization
• Run time APIs
• Example: Search service
• Configuration of the indexer
• Bulk indexing at the start
• Incremental indexing
• Search API

16. What do you deliver: NFRs
Non-functional requirements become important deliverables
• Performance
• You can’t rely on your cloud provider to throw more compute power
• You have to improve the performance of APIs with the same compute power
• Scalability
• Performance of APIs should scale up as you add more nodes
• Remove any bottlenecks/ contentions
• Reliability
• Nodes in a cluster may crash, but service shouldn’t suffer
• Rolling upgrades
• Zero downtime upgrades

17. Testing and Documentation
Testing
• You need to collaborate with testing teams of all impacted teams – internal and external
• Testing gets staggered, important to keep following and not let it go out of your sight
• You can’t declare your epic done, until one or two layers up have tested successfully
Documentation
• Apart from release notes and descriptions of features, you need to write technical notes for developers
• Updates required on developer forums
• Documentation needs to be written at different levels of details for different constituencies
• High level documentation for business audience
• Low level documentation for developers, provide links from high-level to lower level documentation

18. What do you deliver: Your focus
What are you always thinking of?
• In a B2C or front-end PM role, your focus is end-users workflows
• In the platform PM role, you’re always thinking of
• Sequence diagrams / flow of code
• Where does the required API fit into this flow of code
• Which flows of code would a change in an API impact and how

19. Skills required to make you successful
Focus on code, developers, and NFRs means..
• Software development experience is really important
• Easier for a PM with such an experience to understand workings and architecture of the platform
• Easier to understand requirements and collaborate with developers
• A very technical mind
• Ability to go deep
• Passion for software development

20. Thank you!