Yolanda Martin Olivas, Global VP of Design, ClearScore, joins us on this episode to talk about the challenges and strategies involved in building platform capabilities within organizations. 

From her experience of building platforms at companies like Farfetch, Hearst, Canonical, Kaluza, and ClearScore etc., she takes us through the realities (sometimes difficult) of what it’s like to enable platform transformation and growth.

She argues for organizations to rethink the “growing through acquisition” approach while reiterating the need to focus on a strong infrastructure layer.

As a passionate learner, practitioner, and enabler of platform design; Yolanda is one to take tune into. 

Being one of the earliest learners of the Platform Design Toolkit, Yolanda has been a staunch practitioner of the platform business model and has played a pivotal role in enabling it in several organizations. 

In this episode, we talk about organizational motivations to shift towards platform design models, primarily driven by the need for economies of scale and new growth opportunities, and why focusing on your “why” is important. 

From her experience as a Design Director, she further shares practical advice on fostering a broader ecosystem perspective among design teams. She underscores the need for strong leadership commitment to enable this. 

In this conversation we get insights into what made organizations “make it or break it”, so tune in, and get ahead of the curve. 

Key Highlights

👉 Building platform capabilities is complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. Organizations, need to make a special commitment to platform design and implement exclusive strategies targeted toward this, not simply extending their existing practices.

👉 Successful platform transitions often start with integrating internal operations before enabling it to external partners.

👉 Design leaders play a crucial role in guiding organizations through platform transitions by fostering a broader, ecosystem-wide perspective; which does not look at design problems in a silo, but as a cog in a larger ecosystem.

👉 The lack of a mature platform infrastructure can make growth efforts expensive and inefficient. 

👉 There is a high risk in prematurely diverting investment from platform infrastructure to other growth avenues, such as acquiring and creating brands.

👉 Effective platform transitions require targeted education and training for different parts of the organization, tailored to their involvement in the platform’s development stages.

Topics /chapters

(00:00) Navigating Platform Transitions - Intro

(00:58) Introducing Yolanda Martin

(02:50) Building platform capabilities inside organizations?

(11:05) Adapting to platformization changes

(15:55) Design Leadership for Platformization

(20:53) Stories of Transition

(27:23) What did not work for Farfetch platform?

(32:35) Building or Buying the Ecosystem?

(37:05) Looking beyond User-Centered-Design

(43:34) What helps the organization re-arrange?

(48:19) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/yolanda-martin

Episode recorded on March 20, 2024

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