All You Need to Know about Platform Design, in a handy recap
All the Essential Reads to Change your Mindset
This week we’re taking a small break from writing new research content. We took the chance to do something that was due since a while: look back at our blogs of 2016 and 2017, to provide our community with a Platform Design Toolkit’s…Table of Content with all the most interesting reads.
This post will provide you a recap of the various contexts of Platform Design and will serve you an an entry point to explore, read and experiment.
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Let’s start the with a bit of context: answering the question “why is the platform model so important at today” is not always easy. As designers and organization developers, we often find ourselves and our organizations entrenched in last century thinking, and industrial points of view. With “Welcome to a Platforms World: where new Technologies meet new Desires”, the first piece extracted from our 2016’s Whitepaper produced with SWIFT, we aimed at explaining the reader the dual relationship between what technology is making possible, and what the change in user’s expectation are making needed.
Why are Platform Strategies so key to playing a role in modern markets?
When I do my introductory presentations I often point the audience to the book from Barry Libert and others “The Network Imperative”: I do that because I particularly love how the title speaks the truth. Is essential to understand, indeed, that as we live in a world of long tail markets, where users are expecting the possibility to interact with brands (consuming and producing) in a very personalized manner. As we said more than once on this blog, providing personalized services, enabling more niches in a market, is achievable only with platform strategies. This the key industrial to post-industrial organization evolution, it’s all about departing the idea that a brand can provide personalized experiences in a centralized way, and embracing, on the other hand, the idea that only letting systems to self-organize — at the periphery — they can ultimately provide users with the millions of options needed to fulfill modern humans expectations.
Further readings can help the reader explore the “context” and answer more questions: what’s the difference between platforms and infrastructures (“The Evolution & the Context of Platforms”)? What are the key aspects that an organization needs to work on, if it wants to embrace the opportunities given by platform design thinking (“The Three Layers of Digital Transformation”)?
(read our, widely read, best of 2017: a key complement to this post)
Using Platform Strategies to create new Business Cores
Given this context, how can therefore a company seek to innovate its business, exploring new cores and pursuing business innovation, using platform design thinking?
We explained in “Why Business Strategy Innovation is Hard” that often companies are tied to existing assets and perspectives, and therefore fail to bet on market opportunities that are far from their existing business model. By reading “Should your Company become (or build) a Platform?” and “How to use Platforms to Explore new Business Ideas for your Company” one can understand better why platform design is a key capability in this perspective: platform strategies are assetless, and leverage on external resources, therefore allow companies explore new markets and opportunities with lower investments, and higher risk tolerance.
But innovating and creating the new is not so simple anymore: you must be wary of where the market is going, and understand the powerful consolidation trends that made internet sage Tim Berners Lee recently state that we’ve reached the “end of the internet startup”. Our anailays of latest available Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends ’17 (from may) can be a useful shortcut to understanding. The bigger market opportunities now lie in technologically intensive, multi-industry integrated, vertical and life critical platforms (read “The future of Platforms & Markets: reading Meeker’s Internet Trends ‘17”) much beyond the next social network, or … travel rental marketplace app.
Understanding what Platform Design really is
How to actually use Platform Design Toolkit? Beyond the guidelines that you can find online coupled with the canvas PDF download, it may be useful to refer to “Understanding Platform Design“ a framing post on the methodology, again extracted from our Whitepaper.
“Releasing Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 Final” and “Introducing Lean Ecosystem Development” are also essential reads: while the first is the post with which we released PDT 2.0 in late 2016 (more than a year ago already!), the latter represent an essential integration. Lean Ecosystem Development was our key effort in rethinking the decade old practices of Lean Startup and, more specifically, Customer Development for the ecosystem age: what happens when you don’t deal anymore with a customer with a problem to whom you want to provide a solution but with a complex ecosystem of entities that interact to which you want to provide a “platform” for …better interaction?
The key shift is from customers to ecosystems
We’ve explored widely the idea that is time for the customer narrative to die: in “Why we need to go Beyond the “Customer” Narrative” we explained that the main target of your business proposition, in a world where the edges hold an incredible potential, needs to be an ecosystem featuring value producer and consumers trying not only to find a solution to their needs but, increasingly, to provide solutions to others leveraging a growing potential.
Our post on “Evolving User Research in the Age of Platforms & Ecosystems (ecosystem research)” will give you a fresh perspective, and is a key addition to the original Platform Design Toolkit release: the Entity Portrait is a new customer research tool that happily joins the existing family, and is partially inspired from, the Value Proposition canvas and, probably more, from the Empathy map.
Platforms: Design, Validate, Grow, Evolve
Other key reads that a user may like to do, while setting up the extremely different mindset needed to “design for ecosystems” instead of designing for solution-consumerism have been grouped in the omonimous “design for ecosystems” series.
In the first post “Design for Ecosystems: Emergence & Attraction” we tried to clarify the never-ending friction between having a strong idea in mind and looking into what an ecosystem is trying to achieve. Similarly to what happens in the tradition of customer development, we praise the platform designer to avoid inventing something totally new, and focus on observation, helping emergence. To create a successful strategy you’ll need to design a new context for the ecosystem players, something that represent for them a powerful attractor: to do this you’ll need to understand their context greatly and — after design — validate your assumptions of resonance between the context they live everyday (their challenges and pressure, their goals and values, the potential they can express) and the narrative of the platform. A deep explanation, and a cheat sheet, dedicated on setting up your validation interviews, before prototyping, can be found in “Design For Ecosystems: Discovering Potential and Testing Assumptions”.
Platforms are also about letting the users explore
Two additional post will help you understand another key aspect of designing platform strategies: the inherently loose and simplistic nature of platform experiences, designed to allow ecosystems to adapt to the specific context. We’ve been exploring widely the idea that a good platform is always “half baked”: a system that leaves participants play in disobedience to the rule, and keeps an ear open to spot emerging behaviours.
In “Design For Ecosystems: Continuous Co-Creation” we have explained more widely the triad of structures that, most of the times, make up a great platform strategy: inspired by Jean de La Rochebrochard theory, we identified what, in platform strategies, represents the narrative (the wider message embedding culture and values), the primitive (essentially the spaces that allow for interactions to happen) and the enablers (how the platform supports the evolution of participants). For those interested in understanding more of the dynamics of platform evolution, reading “Design APIs for Disobedience” might be a good idea.
In the mentioned post we explained how platforms often leave freedom to the users to experiment new things on top of the value chain, then measure it, and:
- integrate more of the upper ends of the value chain into fully integrated excellent experience;
- commoditize part of the, previously vertically integrated, experiences into components.
To complete the picture of what does it means to create successful platform strategies one can’t surely avoid our compendium of tactics to launch and grow platforms: from what side do you start? Who to attract first? When and how does it make sense to look for generating network effects for defensibility, and how is this very concept changing? “Launching Platforms: Growth Hacking & Network Effects” will give you a precious overview. A particularly interesting perspective, in the context of generating network effects, can also come from the new set of incentives that crypto-tokens can give you when designing a platform strategy: those that are interested in mixing monetary policies with ssytem design might be interested in looking more into “Blockchain Powered Platforms: Tokens” or first exploration on the topic (more coming soon).
Organizations as Platforms
To essentially close the circle we think that every platform designer needs to understand that the barriers between her organization and the rest of the world are disappearing. As a consequence, platform thinking must be seen more as a “way to look at things”, than as a way to design products or services.
As we explained in “Your Organization too, can be a Platform”, and in “Design Organizations for Agency and Self Determination” is essential to understand how the very concept of leadership and agency in organizations changes when one adopts a platform point of view. Once one starts to look at organizations more in terms of the two engines that need to be created (the engine of Transactions, ensuring that all the value creators are in direct relationship with value consumers, and the engine of Learning, see: “Why Platforms need to be Engines of Learning“), one quickly figures out how the organizations starts to behave more as a marketplaces (“Organizations are Marketplaces”). In this context, the objective of the org developer is to ensure that the best emerge and are able to capitalize on their operational reputation and mastery, to attract opportunities, benefits and learning.
The epochal changes that are driving the platform age (falling transaction cost, intense technology empowerment of any individual or team) are pervasive to everything: they certainly don’t stay “outside” your organization just because there’s a “virtual” edge that you may think is real. You quickly figure out that “There’s no such thing as a Platform” but just a continuum between the organization and the ecosystem and that the most important of the organizational structures, the value creation structure connect the inside and the outside of the traditional boundaries of what we consider an organization. We need to start thinking of organizing less as a “noun” (organization) and more as a verb, referring to the very act of organizing parties — through incentives — around our objectives: as we recently said, everyone can work for you now, if you just have a set of incentives that is convincing enough.
In such a dynamic context, where the focus of the organization radically switches towards the dynamic and ever powerful outside, the future of the organization can only be defined in “interaction” with its ecosystem. There’s an ever increasing importance of elements such as the shared culture the organization embeds, the open governance practices that it adopts and the intelligence that can deploy to interpret the data to evolve better. “The Meaning of the Platform Organization” and “The Elements of the Platform Organization” nicely complement the reading of the “There’s no such thing as a Platform” (a reading that, in any case, we suggest you to do beforehand) in giving you a complete understanding of this context.
This post aimed at giving the reader (and user) a bird’s eye view on what has been the object of our research in the last two years, and to provide a quick map of the key topics that a platform thinker may want to explore, to get to a full understanding of the real meaning that hides behind buzzwords.
Our next Masterclass in Paris is sold out! But we’re about to announce three more location in Europe: Stockholm, Amsterdam and Bruxelles. Stay tuned here and we’ll send you the fresh link with early discounts when the tickets become available!
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