In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Soumeya Benghanem welcomes Arjun Subramanian as they discuss platform product management. This is one of the most challenging roles in product management as they are the ones who have to work closely with the engineering team to ensure that the product is well-maintained. For those PMs who are interested in this role, in order to be successful in this field, you need not only to understand the core technologies but be able to look at the long-term scalability of the product.

Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.

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What to Listen For:

00:00 Intro
03:42 What is a platform product?
07:42 Platform as a channel of delivery
12:05 Building a platform too late
16:09 Platform economics
17:48 Metrics of success for platform
21:47 Measuring cost savings
25:05 Mean time to recovery
26:39 Funding the platform team
29:38 Who can be a platform product manager?
34:22 Platform PMs need to be more technical
36:50 Edutainment
38:25 Advice for PMs stitching technologies together into a single platform
42:21 Building a unified user experience
44:27 Final thoughts

73: ABCs of Platform Product Management