AMA: DocuSign Senior Director of Product, AI/ML & Big Data platform, Deepak Mukunthu on Platform Product Management

As a Product Manager, you are responsible for: 1. Defining product vision/strategy/roadmap based on deep understand of customers, business and competitive landscape 2. Working with various cross-functional stakeholders and partners to execute on your roadmap and ship product/features 3. Establishing processes to gather customer feedback to continuously evolve the product Platform Product Manager role is very different except the product is a platform and hence your customers are the ones using the platform. Exact customer persona will depend on the specifics of the platform. Success is typically measured by adoption of your platform, customer satisfaction and the business impact your platform has. See this question for more details on metrics: https://sharebird.com/h/product-management/q/what-metrics-do-you-focus-on-as-platform-product-manager 

Depending on the phase of the project or lifecycle stage of the product, a product manager collaborates with many different functions. During intial phases, you work with customer/account teams to understand demand, then with designers and user research teams to perform user research, usability studies, focus groups to understand and define. Once you an MVP, work with customers and account teams to get feedback. When you are ready to ship public offering, work with documentation and marketing team. As you scale sales, you work with sales/field enablement team to streamline that process. Through out this journey, you work with legal, compliance, privacy and security champs to get your approach, design and product reviewed.

It really depends on the phase of your product definition/execution, but at a high level, you spend ~30% of your time working with customers, ~20% of your time in market research, compete analysis, drafting vision/strategy, ~20% of your time working with Engineering teams on execution and rest of your time working with cross-functional teams managing the product lifecycle including ideation, design, customer/user studies, legal/privacy/security, documentation, marketing, sales.

As a Product Manager, you are responsible for: 1. Defining product vision/strategy/roadmap based on deep understand of customers, business and competitive landscape 2. Working with various cross-functional stakeholders and partners to execute on your roadmap and ship product/features 3. Establishing processes to gather customer feedback to continuously evolve the product Platform Product Manager role is very different except the product is a platform and hence your customers are the ones using the platform. Exact customer persona will depend on the specifics of the platform. Success is typically measured by adoption of your platform, customer satisfaction and the business impact your platform has. See this question for more details on metrics: https://sharebird.com/h/product-management/q/what-metrics-do-you-focus-on-as-platform-product-manager 

Yes, customer feedback is one of the most critical inputs to prioritization. For Platforms, you typically focus on 2 sets of customers: 1. Direct customers: These are users of the platform. Exact customer persona will depend on the specifics of the platform. For e.g., if you are building an ML platform, your typical persona would be data scientists, ML engineers. 2. Indirect customers: These are users who will see the value of the work your direct customers are doing. Depending on whether you are building an internal or external facing platform, level of focus on these 2 segments of customers will vary. As Platform Product Manager, you focus on direct customers using your platform but also focus on the business impact it has on indirect customers. Hence, it is recommended that you have a good line of sight on business impact as part of your platform roadmap.

Assuming your question is on how to prioritize the right set of features, here is my answer: First step is to understand customer scenarios/workflows and associated pain-points and needs. Combine that with business opportunity of that investment, also having a close eye on the market and compete landscape. Finally, use rigorous prioritization to focus on highest ROI - take into account both customer/business value as well as associated cost to deliver. This is no different from a typical Product team. A key focus on platform team should be to invest in durable, long-lasting capabilities that will benefit many customer as opposed to focusing on short-term wins for a select set of customers (this can result in custom solutions that become hard to generalize in future).

Assuming ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile, you need to have a clear understanding of the persona you are targeting with your platform. For that persona, you could target different profiles of companies - enterprise, SMB or small shops, depending on your business goals.

If you are referring to individual products using capabilities from broader platform, I would categorize those products are target customer scenarios that the platform enables. As you come up with the roadmap for your platform, you need to work closely with all those scenario owners / customers and align your roadmap to enable those scenarios to succeed. While you decide on platform capabilities based on deep understanding of customer scenarios, if you align the execution of your roadmap with the scenario timeline, you have a higher chances of success. In other words, don't just build a platform but line up your execution to align with the consuming scenario so you can demonstrate clear business impact. Different companies/teams use differnt tools to align roadmaps. More than aligning roadmaps, you align on success metrics (you can use frameworks like OKR framework) and your execution dependencies/timelines (you can use any schedule tracking tools or excel simplistically).

Impact is typically measured by customer and business value that product/project brings in. First step is to understand customer scenarios/workflows and associated pain-points and needs. Combine that with business opportunity of that investment, also having a close eye on the market and compete landscape. Finally, use rigorous prioritization to focus on highest ROI - take into account both customer/business value as well as associated cost to deliver. This is no different from a typical Product team. A key focus on platform team should be to invest in durable, long-lasting capabilities that will benefit many customer as opposed to focusing on short-term wins for a select set of customers (this can result in custom solutions that become hard to generalize in future).

From metrics perspective, it's no different from standard product metrics. I've seen many different metrics frameworks being used, all of which essentially boil down to these 4 metric categories: 1. Operational metrics: Is the product functioning as expected? Success rates, Latency etc. 2. Usage metrics: Is the product being used? DAU/MAU, Frequency of use, customer retention/churn, Requests/sec, data volume etc. 3. Satisfaction metrics: Are customers satisfied? In-product feedback (thumbs-up, thumbs-down), NPS scores via surveys etc. 4. Impact metrics: How is the product helping customers achieve business impact? This is subjective and need to be defined per product and is also typically based on customer scenarios.