Best Practices on Platform Product Management by PayPal Sr PM, Manickkam Pandian

Industry Platforms

"Set of technologies that enable products to share data and experiences with one another"

The platform is the way forward to enable customers to get more and more products in a scalable way.
Transaction platforms allow transactions between multiple users.

Many companies can focus on a specific goal and once it is well built, that industry company will be focused on capturing that specific space. And we need to understand how to manage platform products.

What is Platform product management

The platform is about scalability and reusability.
There is product management for customer growth, the main goal of which is to increase engagement, increase revenue or attract more customers. The purpose of their organization is to connect with customers and understand which one will work best.
If you look at the platform from the other side, then there are many platforms, and each of these segments would need the power of these platforms. Once you create a platform, the platform will have its own experience for end customers, so you need to understand how to specifically interact with your platforms. And it is important that the platform product manager contacted each of these product lines and understood how to build a platform for the future. It can be built in a scalable way and based on the organizational structure of the company.
You need to understand why creating the right platform experience is important for end customers and what are the different types of best practices, especially for platform product management.

Best Practices of Platform Product Management

  1. Build a strategic platform vision

Best practices:

  • Understand the broader big picture along with necessary research and data analysis

  • Understand organization priorities / goals at define clear KPIs

  • Business and Architectural alignment

  • Understand customer's customer as well

  • Create concise long-term product roadmaps

Scenarios:

  • Abuse management platform for different use cases

  • Dispute management as a service.

  1. Balanced approach on prioritization

Best practices:

  • Manage different types of stakeholders – users, primary internal stakeholders, customer growth Pms, developers

  • Solve the pain

  • Concise at accurate communication for scaling the platform easily

Scenarios:

  • Customize for biggest partners – Google and PayPal

  • Business goals for immediate partner need vs scalable common platforms

  1. Collaborate to execute relentlessly

  1. Measure at monitor to learn continuously

Best practices:

  • Receive feedback from stakeholders at customers to learn continuously

  • Monitor at measure the KPIs continuously

  • Be open-minded and gather product feedback to build a more valuable platform

  • Documenting the capabilities to enable self-serve integration

Scenarios:

  • Monitoring performance of strategies on managing fraud at identifying enhancements

  • Business review on a periodic fashion

These are guidelines or suggestions that you would recommend having on your platform and that's what we do on our platform to accommodate. It helps to understand emerging trends and create those right opportunities on the platform.

Manickkam Pandian, PayPal Sr PM