The Invisible Product Manager: Getting Started With Platform Product Management

Have you ever been impressed by the fact that you can pay your colleagues via Paypal directly from your Outlook application or how you get an SMS delivered to your phone when you use Uber or how large operating systems that power millions of computers have existed for decades? If your answer is yes, then you are going to have to thank a village of people who built these capabilities. Odds are there were one or many Technical or Platform Product Managers who had the vision, collaborated with cross functional teams and stakeholders, influenced and ultimately steered multiple cross-functional teams to deliver these fantastic innovations to your fingertips. Our goal in this book is to talk about our experience with technology platforms, and what it takes to be a Product Manager. We will explore technology platforms, when it should be leveraged and who are some of the key players within this ecosystem.

If you are an engineer and you would like to move to platform product management roles, we will teach you what superpowers you need to hone, who are your allies and how to articulate and understand the business side of the platform.

If you are a leader within an organization or a company, and you would like to pivot to a platform business model, we will not only share the potential pitfalls, but also the kind of team and culture that needs to be built in order to support it.

This book is not an interview preparation book. We expect our audience to have some familiarity with technology companies, product management and the associated methodologies for development. With that being said, we will make our best effort to provide plain-english explanations of our concepts and ideas.