How to Navigate Career Success and Team Success as a Platform PM

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I think it's getting crisp about the value that the platform team is providing to the rest of the business and ultimately helping better prioritize what work the team should be pursuing. There's a great book out there called the build trap by Melissa Perry, and she kind of describes the alternative which is like you get in this pattern of like getting really good at like executing but you're sort of building things. I think it's like you can get into this pattern of operating more from like a platform as a product perspective. You'll have higher confidence, higher conviction that the things that your platform team is pursuing are the things that are most valuable to the business and its broader goals.

As product lead, Russ Nealis has been focused on introducing the discipline of product management in the Developer Foundations organization. This episode discusses the reasons why PMs are currently uncommon in platform organizations, examples of when having a PM has been helpful, and more.

Discussion points:

(1:23) Russ’s role at Plaid
(2:49) Why platform product managers are uncommon
(3:28) Backgrounds to look for when hiring a platform PM
(4:58) Deciding whether to hire a platform PM
(6:20) Signs that bringing in a Product Manager would be beneficial
(9:16) How Russ personally became a platform PM
(12:15) Whether a platform PM is a career path
(14:55) Articulating the business impact a platform PM has
(18:56) Challenges Plaid’s platform team has faced without a PM
(19:19) Symptoms of a need for product management in an internal-facing team
(30:15) Whether Twilio had platform PMs
(31:22) Example projects where PMs have been crucial
(34:12) How the book “Ask Your Developer” influenced Twilio’s engineering culture
(36:13) Getting started with introducing a product management discipline to an organization
(38:33) Org structure and where platform PMs may report
(40:00) Career ladder for platform PM when reporting to engineering leadership
(41:20) Being product-led or technology-led
(43:14) How technical skills may help when in a platform PM role

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Mentions and links:
Follow Russ on LinkedIn
Episode 7 with Will Larson - related to why it’s difficult to find Platform PMs
Episode 27 with Jean-Michel Lemieux - related to the percentage of investment that should be put towards platform investments
The Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson