How to Manage a Platform Product by Yelp Product Manager
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
4 likes•2,412 views
In this presentation you will learn what a platform product manager does, how to build platforms that delight your customers and learn more about the rewards and challenges of platform product management.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to How to Manage a Platform Product by Yelp Product Manager
Similar to How to Manage a Platform Product by Yelp Product Manager (20)
More from Product School
More from Product School (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
How to Manage a Platform Product by Yelp Product Manager
- 1. www.productschool.com How to Manage a Platform Product by Yelp Product Manager
- 2. FREE INVITE Join 30,000+ Product Managers on
- 3. COURSES Product Management Learn the skills you need to land a product manager job
- 4. COURSES Coding for Managers Build a website and gain the technical knowledge to lead software engineers
- 5. COURSES Data Analytics for Managers Learn the skills to understand web analytics, SQL and machine learning concepts
- 6. COURSES Digital Marketing for Managers Learn how to acquire more users and convert them into clients
- 7. COURSES Blockchain for Managers Learn how to trade cryptocurrencies and build products using the blockchain
- 9. Hirav Gandhi hgandhi@alumni.stanford.edu How to Manage a Platform Product Product School December 4, 2018
- 10. ● What is a platform? ● How do product managers help manage platforms? ● What are the unique challenges of platform product management? Agenda
- 11. A little bit about me and why I’m here!
- 12. What is a platform?
- 13. “Platforms are structures that allow multiple products to be built within the same technical framework. Companies invest in platforms in the hope that future products can be developed faster and cheaper, than if they built them stand-alone.” - Jonathan Clarks, Tech Blogger Platforms are foundations for other products.
- 14. Platforms are all around us. George Westinghouse was an early pioneer of alternating current (AC) electric grids. His main goal was targeting a new emerging market for electric arc lighting. Through his distributed grid, he made electric lighting available to the masses. He didn’t anticipate or imagine the countless other applications of his work.
- 15. Platforms foster innovation and scale. What new businesses and opportunities would exist if collecting payments were relatively effortless? What new businesses and opportunities would exist if deploying infrastructure were relatively effortless? What new businesses and opportunities would exist if installing (mobile) apps were relatively effortless? What new businesses and opportunities would exist if buying services from local businesses were relatively effortless?
- 16. Internal-facing platform: A platform that serves apps internally. A few helpful definitions: External-facing platform: A platform that serves external customers directly. Powered by Yelp’s Ad Platform Plaid’s drop-in components allow other apps to validate a user’s bank accounts.
- 17. Client teams - other (internal) teams that use your platform to deliver goods and/or services to your company’s customers. Customers Buyers - the people buying goods/services from your company. Users - the people using the good/services from your company. A few more helpful definitions:
- 18. What is platform product management?
- 19. ● Guide platform teams ● Prioritize the needs of clients ● Serve customers via the platform Platform PMs...
- 20. We ask questions like: ● How do we create platforms that enable growth? ● Where do we see ourselves as a company in the short-term and long-term? How does the platform get us there? ● What needs to be a platform? What doesn’t? Platform PMs guide platform teams.
- 21. To prioritize between different client priorities, we ask: ● Which clients move the needle the most and the quickest? ● Can we solve multiple clients’ needs with one set of functionality? ● What is our MVP? What is needed in the future? Platform PMs prioritize the needs of clients. Above: The vast majority of AWS customers are small businesses. How does AWS balance their needs against large customers like Netflix and Yelp?
- 22. ● Who are my customers? ○ Are they the people who access my platform directly? Via an interface? ● What are my customer/stakeholder personas? ○ Developers? ○ Businesspeople? ○ CIO/CTOs? ○ Some other group? Platform PMs serve customers and stakeholders via the platform. Above: Stripe ruthlessly focuses on the developer experience as its core user persona.
- 23. Why is platform PMing fun but challenging?
- 24. ● What is technically possible and not possible? ● What makes for intuitive platforms that are simple for clients to use? ● What gotchas will make your platform fail to serve your clients’ needs? Platform PM requires solid technical skill.
- 25. Because platforms are often only accessible via a front- end, it can be hard to measure your metrics independently of the front- end to determine what you impacted vs. what they impacted. It can be hard to articulate your results. Above: Time to production for a new customer is one way in which platforms (Google Cloud listed above) can measure success.
- 26. Trading off flexibility vs investment is tricky. More functionality Generic enough for current/future customers Time to launch Work needed for new customers vs
- 27. ● You may have multiple front-ends or front end teams that need something from your platform, but you don’t have capacity for all of their requests. ● It can also be hard to push back on some teams, especially when they have a siloed view of what the company needs and know less about other client requests. Juggling priorities between clients requires skill.
- 28. You promised me fun?!
- 29. Yelp’s Mission Connecting people with great local businesses.
- 30. Because platforms deliver so much value to so many customers, platforms can reach further than most products. You can’t beat the scale of a platform. Above: Yelp’s Commerce Platform serves everyone from the boutique Basecamp Hotel to large national businesses like Farmers Insurance.
- 31. You can’t beat the impact of a platform. Above: Yelp’s Commerce Platform serves everyone from business owners signing up for ads to customers looking to book reservations with Yelp.
- 32. Developers love you. Platforms allow you to build products that developers love, and your own development team will admire your dedication to people like them.
- 35. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management, Coding, Data, Digital Marketing and Blockchain courses in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Austin, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Orange County, Seattle, Bellevue, Toronto, London and Online
Editor's Notes
- Been doing tech since I was in 5th grade; been in a wide variety of parts of the industry since 2007. Started off as a strategy consultant, co-founded two startups, WalmartLabs and now Yelp; moved between business and engineering roles Responsible for Yelp’s core commerce components (subscriptions, billing, pricing, promotions, etc.) Graduated from Stanford in industrial engineering/management science and engineering
- Platform can be a vague term. Are Airbnb, Facebook and Uber just platforms for two sets of people to transact, with a bunch of products built on top of them? We are going to be talking more about core technologies that allow others to build products on top of them, but in a broader sense, most of the startups you may know today consider themselves platform companies.
- Internal facing platforms tend to be the unsung heroes of the tech world, with external-facing platforms receiving the vast majority of the credit.
- Note: If you are a platform company, your client teams and customers are the same people.
- At Yelp, I often find myself asking these questions. As a product manager running our Revenue team, we need to get ahead of where we believe the company will be in the future. Investments we made earlier in the year have paid off by allowing us to roll out new products quickly like Verified License.
- At Yelp, we have many types of business owners. While we have traditionally focused on smaller businesses, national businesses are making up a larger and larger portion of our revenue. While smaller businesses might require a set of functionality where they are largely auto-guided through the purchase process, larger businesses with whole marketing teams want finer tuned control over their spend on Yelp (maybe lean into examples of Ads Backend?)
- Leading the revenue team, we have to often balance the needs of the developers and PMs who rely on us to launch new features, while also balancing against the needs of our internal stakeholders. There have been plenty of times when I have had to trade off investing in customer-facing functionality vs serving internal stakeholders to make our internal processes robust and sustainable.
- TODO: Highlight this as a necessary skill for former engineers in the audience.
- For in-house products, running analytics on in-house customers is super helpful. On the in-house theme, I think there's a ton of power to testimonials. because everyone is part of the same tribe, in-house vouching is huge. Many platforms tend to operate in areas that aren't "sexy", and so most people don't think about how to measure success... that makes it easier (in some ways) to define your own success criteria.
- NOTE: pulled clients that already had public case studies on Yelp.com. Basecamp Hotel: https://biz.yelp.com/support/case_studies and Farmers: https://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/assets/srv0/yelp_large_assets/ec15958ab16c/assets/img/case_studies/Farmers.pdf
- [Social Media Slide]