Navigating ➤ Platform Design Toolkit
A user orientation compass to understand when and how the Platform Design Toolkit may turn useful
A couple of weeks ago we shared with our community an update regarding the directions of development that we are going to follow in the next months.
In this brief post our aim is to give who’s curious about the Platform Design Toolkit a more detailed explanation of what the Platform Design Toolkit is, how the companion methodology works, and when and how these tools can be used to design solutions for particular challenges.
This post wants to be a compass for Platform Design Toolkit adopters excited about using it to create platform strategies.
So what is a Platform? What can I apply platform thinking on?
Despite the word “platform” is around since a while, and despite the giants of our digital economy are all ecosystem-based companies, these concepts always offer many different interpretations.
There are three particularly nice definitions of platforms that we often use in our work. The first one is from Sangeet Choudary, defining platforms as “business models that allow multiple sides (producers and consumers) to interact […] by providing an infrastructure that connects them”, a definition that focuses much on the use of platform thinking to design new ways to create business and services.
Two more definitions, among the ones we like the most, are from strategic thinking legend John Hagel. Hagel defines platforms as “governance structures […] that determine who can participate, what roles they might play, how they might interact and how disputes get resolved” and “an additional set of protocols or standards […] to facilitate connection, coordination, and collaboration”. This always makes me think about platforms like the mix between the rulebook, the field and the referee in a football game: you can surely play football on the streets, but if you want to play as a professional you’ll need your championship platform.
A further definition — that kind of closes the circle — always from Hagel — is that of the platform as “…an effort to broadly redefine the terms of competition for a market sector through a positive, galvanizing message that promises benefits to all who adopt the new terms”: the dimension of the message, the story the platform tells, the narrative of extended opportunities is equally important.
As a synthesis, we could say that platforms are scalable collaboration agreements powered by technologies: it’s impossible to discern between a technology, a strategy or the organization itself; at the end, everything molds into seeing platform thinking a way to organize value creation at scale for a particular ecosystem of interacting entities.
Platform thinking is a way to organize value creation at scale for a particular ecosystem of interacting entities.
According to these reflections we can use the word “platform” to describe things as different as an internet marketplace business, a corporate strategy encompassing and motivating to shape a particular mission (open innovation, IT development or HR are all cases on which we’ve been working on). Platform thinking can also be seen as a whole new way to look at organizations or processes, or even a way to innovate how a place or a community works — as when applying platform thinking to cities or towns policies and services.
Why are Platform Strategies so Important?
Overall, platform organizations are winning because two relevant shifts.
On one hand, there’s a growing potential in every individual or small organizations: thanks to ever growing and accessible technologies (think smartphones but also 3D printers), and as a service infrastructures now there’s a lot you can do from the edge of a market, or system.
On the other hand, the ease of connecting and coordinating on large scale is growing (cost of coordination is falling) and consumers expects special, and customized solutions to fit their expectations.
These changes transformed the optimal shape of a company, product or strategy from the industrial “pipeline” (and bureaucracy) to the network.
And …What is Platform Design Toolkit?
Platform Design Toolkit is a methodology that helps designers, founders and managers to design strategies, products and organizations “as a platform”. It’s essentially made of:
- a logical framework used to simplify and describe what a platform is,
- a set of design canvases to be used to codify information,
- a facilitation practice to help teams using the elements above,
Our canvases are normally used in large wall prints as an aid during sessions where teams co-create with the support of a facilitator. In this way the team co-designs to reach two essential objectives:
- design how the collaborative value system (e.g.: a marketplace startup model, a large organization initiative, ….) should work;
- prepare all the information needed to create a prototype (Minimum Viable Platform).
The facilitation flow, that is detailed in our User Guide (download from here), and that we teach during our public masterclasses, focuses on the questions to ask and the connection between the different tools. If you’re curious to see the future evolution look at this post.
This approach (based on canvases and guidelines to facilitation) is generally quite common in the world of Design Thinking and Service Design. Famous visual tools include Customer Journey Maps, Empathy maps, Stakeholder Maps, and many, many more.
Probably the most famous canvas ever, the one that inspired us to create the original Platform Design Canvas in 2013, is the world beloved Business Model Canvas created by our continuous inspiration Alex Osterwalder together with Yves Pigneur.
The Platform Design Toolkit is based on the tradition of Business Modeling, Service Design Thinking and Lean Thinking (including concepts from Customer Development, the Lean Startup, the work of Lean Startup Machine on validation, etc…) and provides a unified view, optimized for Platforms and Ecosystems, of all these relevant tools and approaches.
In the end of the day, the Platform Design Toolkit, plus all our workshops and masterclasses, aim at essentially help adopters with two things:
- develop a clear and shared strategic design, a vision of how the platform strategy could work;
- develop a clear idea of what is the first “version” of the platform that the team is going to use to learn and validate if the main ideas are good.
This last goal is exactly the mission of a so called Minimum Viable Platform: to learn if our design assumptions are right and learn if all the entities (the ecosystem) we are designing for are really keen to join our platform strategy to reach their current objectives.
The MVP is therefore a (kind of) basic version of a platform, used to generate what is normally called validated learning on the riskiest assumptions: is the business model right? Are the ecosystem’s participants willing to join? Will they see value in what we provide?.
If you’re curious, you can browse the Wikipedia entry for MVP here or read our post dedicated to Lean Ecosystem Development.
The Logic behind the Platform Design Toolkit
To help users achieve these results, Platform Design Toolkit is based on a few logical assumptions and key concepts.
First, we model ecosystems as based on five key roles.
Platform Owners (or shapers), steer and runn the platform strategy: in a new startup these are normally identified in the founders and investors, while if you’re dealing with a corporate platform strategy — let’s say we’re rethinking open innovation as a platform — the project team can be normally characterized as such.
Following owners you have the three essential type of entities that compose the value creation system that the platform sustains. As in any “market” you’ve producers and consumers: we normally add “peer” (so to have peer producers and peer consumers) to stress the point that these entities — they are not just individuals but can be teams, small organizations ,etc…— are relating to each other directly in direct transactions and relationships.
A further differentiation that we make is to consider the producing side of the economy we’re modeling as divided in peer producers and partners. We introduced the concept of partners in PDT 2.0 because we wanted to stress the point that, most often, platforms offer a way for participants to step up their contribution and be more strategically linked to the platform. Partners are quite always professional entities.
To complete the picture you normally also have stakeholders, entities that are interested and impacted by the platform’s externalities (both positive or negative). Again, please refer to the User Guide (download from here) for a complete description of the model.
The other key pillar of our logic model is to see platform strategies as composed of two essential elements: a transaction engine and an improvement & learning engine.
Every platform strategy is about creating a marketplace, a place where producers and consumers can interact and where value can be traded in peer to peer fashion: this is the transaction engine, and it is made of well designed channels that make possible to trade value easily.
Every platform strategy also is characterized by services that the platform owners provide to the participants in the ecosystem to help them learn, improve and gain reputation: these are services that support participants’ evolution, in the end improving the overall quality of the services that they provide to consumers on the demand side of the platform.
To have a clearer idea of the role of these engines read this post.
A Final Recap
The world has changed: thanks to several techno-social shifts the best shape of a company, a product or a strategy today is the network (platform) and you can’t avoid considering this shift in everything you do. This is providing new opportunities and is also manifesting as an entirely new set of threats.
Platform Design Toolkit provides you a complete methodology (design canvases, facilitation guidelines and logical framework) to understand, design and test platform strategies in any context.
Platform Design Toolkit key pillar is based on the fact that platform strategies are made of a transaction engine (a marketplace) and a learning engine (services you provide for the growth, maturation and improvement of all entities in the ecosystem).
thanks to several techno-social shifts the best shape of a company, a product or a strategy today is the network (platform) and you can’t avoid considering this shift in everything you do.
We provided this post to help our potential user base to navigate the complexity and understand how our Free and Open Source methodology can help respond to the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation.
- Access our website here > platformdesigntoolkit.com
- Download here the complete toolkit and methodology user guide
- Download here our White Paper “From Business Modeling to Platform Design”
>> Everything we create is Free and Open, licensed in Creative Commons
Show support by clapping this post 👏
Do you want to learn how to use this methodology from the ones that created and evolve it? Join our upcoming Masterclasses.
A participant once said the masterclass: “changed the perception of what is possible”.
Check all available masterclasses here on our website or reach out directly for special deals and large groups.
Compass Photo by Anastasia Petrova on Unsplash
