What do you find the most difficult in Platform Product Management?

I’ve held roles as both platform and non-platform product managers and I’d say being a platform product manager is definitely the most challenging but rewarding. The most challenging part is your solutions are more abstract and less obvious. Instead of building solutions directly for customers, you’re buildings tools for customers to build the solutions themselves. Does your head hurt yet? Let me give an example. 

Let’s say you’re trying to let customers customize the way their HubSpot UI looks. While you could try to build all the customization requests you get, no two customers want the same thing and it’d be impossible for our product teams to keep up with that demand. Instead, you build tools for external developers and admin users to configure the UI in the way they need. But how do you figure out which tools?

Here is the usual process for regular product management:

1. Collect customer use cases

2. Identify a pattern

3. Build a solution that solves for the majority of use cases.

Here is the process for platform product management with an extra step:

1. Collect customer use cases

2. Identify a pattern

3. Identify a pattern across solutions

4. Build a solution that solves for the majority of use cases.
   

Still confused? Let me make the customization example even more specific. Let’s say you notice that a lot of customers want to display their HubSpot data in a table format on the CRM record page. Taking a non-platform approach, you’d build out every single table request that customers make. But this isn’t scalable. Instead, you build a configurable table component that customers can populate with their own data and then display. Believe me, I struggled for a long time with this adjustment in thinking but I promise if you choose to pursue it, you’ll love the wider impact that you’re able to have on customers!

One of the most challenging aspects of Platform Product Management is balancing the diverse needs of multiple stakeholders while maintaining a cohesive platform strategy.

This involves navigating trade-offs between short-term tactical needs and long-term strategic goals, aligning roadmaps for individual products with the broader platform vision, driving adoption among internal teams and external customers, staying agile in a rapidly evolving ecosystem, and managing complex dependencies.

Overcoming these challenges requires strategic thinking, effective communication, and a relentless focus on delivering value to all stakeholders.