Platform as a Product

The CNCF’s research into product thinking for platforms.

But why

  • Get insights into the current product thinking practives of platform builders
  • Topics: Needs/Paintpoints/Behaviour
  • Target: Create personas based on insights
  • Find out what people are doing, not hew they are doing

How?

  • Survey for quantity
  • Interviews for quality

Challenges

  • Asking questions without sugessting answers
  • Consensus on research goals
  • Motivation and time investment (on interviewer and interviewee side) + Non-Responses
  • Toolsing: There is no standard tooling at the CNCF for this kind of research
  • Small sample size -> No real research insights, just signals/hints

Analysis

  • Working with assumptions was hard in combination with the small sample size
  • Survey: Survey Tool (Google Forms) combined with a whiteboard tool for clustering and analysis
  • Interviews: They used ai for time efficiency but the prompt escalated a bit leading to no real time gain -> But you can scale the same prompt to infinite sample sized
  • Challemnge: AI confidently churns out wrong answers -> Use source links to verify and scoping

TODO: Steal worklow from slides

Outcome/Signals

  • Platform Orgs use Prioritization Frameworks onconsciously: “We don’t use product management and tools like that” -> Well you do, you just don’t call it PM and are a bit unstructured
    • Structured Activities: Interviews (talking to each other), Focus groups, quantitative data, …
    • Roadmap influence: Insight, prioritization, painpoints, backlogs
    • Regular planning meetings
  • Platform orgs struggle to define and actually implement measures of success: Measure activity over impact, success is often felt instead of proved
  • Platform teams have varied control over their work: Depndening on company size and business relationships

Future

  • Baseline: They have some signals
  • Question: Are these pattern successfull
  • Needed: More data and better organization