armakuni.com Unleashing Success: The Power of Product Mindset & Customer-Centricity in Platform as a Product Faye Benfield & Zenon Hannick

Who are we? Faye Benfield Zenon Hannick

Benedict Steele Who am I?

A product mindset and product practices are key to delivering a valuable and usable platform

If you only remember one thing

REMEMBER ONE THING

Be user centric

Know your users

Understand their needs

Build a platform they love to use

Common problems

One platform to rule them all

Assuming we know what users need

Feature factory of outputs

🧠 Cognitive Load “the total amount of mental effort used in the working memory”

Product mindset and practices

User Research To tackle: assuming we know what users need ● Deep, authentic, understanding of users is generated over time, continuously. ● Gather user feedback regularly ● Build empathy ● So that, you increase information quality

Understand the End to End Value Chain To tackle: Assuming we know what our users need Value stream mapping ● Places user at the centre ● Focuses on flow of value ● Provides metrics

Example Value Stream Map

Whole team ownership of product practice To tackle: Feature Factory of Outputs ● It starts with a conversation ● Story writing is a whole team responsibility ● It ends with high quality outcomes

Sensing For An Emergent Platform To tackle: Building One Platform to Rule them All ● You can not know how your platform should develop ● Build with the “Thinnest Viable Platform” across the whole life of the platform

Thinnest Viable Platform Smallest set of APIs, documentation, and tools needed to accelerate teams developing modern software services and systems

REMEMBER ONE THING

Sensing for an Emergent Platform To tackle: Building One Platform to Rule them All Experimentation ● We believe ● Will result in ● We will have confidence to proceed when https://barryoreilly.com/explore/blog/how-to-implement-hypothesis-driven-development/

Experimentation Sensing for an Emergent Platform

Discoverability and onboarding To tackle - Adding to end users cognitive load ● Identify your target users ● Get their input to design the onboarding process ● Promote the platform, utilise existing forums ● Ask your early adopters to promote it to others

Simple to discover and easy to use Key to a successful internal platform “Create a path of least resistance. Make the right thing the easiest thing to do’ Evan Bottcher, 2018

Always be user centric

Further Reading & Resources ● https://www.productplan.com/glossary/platform -product-manager/ ● https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-pla tforms.html ● https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2017/0 3/22/product-and-platform/ ● https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-gb/insights/ articles/infrastructure-as-product ● https://teamtopologies.com/videos-slides/what-i s-platform-as-a-product-clues-from-team-topol ogies

Platform as a Product Videos ● Team Topologies - Why Platform as a Product Video ● What is the true value of a platform? ● Creating Metrics to Measure your Internal Platform ● Managing your Platform as a Product ● The ins and outs of delivering your platform as a product ● Introducing product into your platform ● Fast Flow Conference - A Team Topologies Conference ○ Cognitive Load: Bogged Down and Burnt Out ○ Bring Product Thinking to you Platform

Thank you (Complaints go here) Faye Benfield faye.benfield@armakuni,com www.linkedin.com/in/faye-benfield/ Zenon Hannick [email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/zenonhannick/

Thank you (Praise goes here) Benedict Steele benedict.steele@armakuni,com www.linkedin.com/in/benedictsteele/

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