Part VI: Growing Platforms

Platforms thrive on scale, but platform users don’t just appear overnight. Instead, they have to be identified, recruited, and carefully nurtured. If your platform is too basic, it will turn off early adopters and fizzle out before it ever gains traction. Vice versa, over-investing into features before you have real user feedback is risky because it could lead you down a wrong path.

This part discusses how you can grow your platform over time to expand its user base.

• Platforms live in three dimensions, so it’s natural to model platform evolution as a cube.
• It’s easy to assume that each user is “all in” on a platform, but that’s not how things start. Plotting users’ experience with your platform over time can be a valuable design technique.
• Explaining what your platform delivers versus what users are expected to handle can be surprisingly difficult. Perhaps a picture says 1000 words?
• Maintaining a platform roadmap is a delicate balancing act between accepting user input and sticking to the product strategy.
• You might not be able to serve a wide range of customers with a single offering. Instead, you might need to tier and slice your platform.