Hiring the right type of product leadership is crucial for scaling and sustaining a business. One sometimes overlooked, but essential product leader is the VP Product Platforms.
We recently sat down with Alianna Inzana, Vice President of Product at WeTransfer . Her expertise lies in platforms, APIs, services, trust, safety, and infrastructure.
In this article, Alianna provides a comprehensive guide to:
As the CEO or CPO of a successful product company, you have built your core product on a platform optimized for speed on delivery. That platform scaled from your beta launches through to finding product-market-fit, and now your product team is considering expanding beyond the core product. But building a product business at scale presents unique challenges.
Platforms optimized for product iteration through ‘fast failing’ will often fail fast when operating at the actual scale of a business. Infrastructure choices start to impact revenue. For example, a B2B site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate three times as high as one that loads in 5 seconds (according to a study by Portent). Expansion into new customers and markets comes at the cost of feature work.
At this stage, a common refrain from product teams is, ‘The roadmap is delayed for tech debt.’ To drive the long-term vision so you need a VP Product Platforms to translate that vision into products that will scale and expand the business.
Product platforms – like automotive platforms – are the structural foundation of a product. They can be divided into two areas:
Platforms are the building blocks for an organization to efficiently deliver customer-facing value through one or many products. An organization that reuses and standardizes these building blocks of product operates with greater efficiency and profitability, especially at scale.
Product Platform leaders are brought in for their expertise in scaling the business. They are ‘technologically bilingual’—speaking the languages of both engineering and business, and more importantly effectively translating between the two.
They see how the core capabilities that make your product unique can diversify revenue channels and enhance your offerings ’stickiness’ through integration into the broader product ecosystem.
They understand where strategic platform investments, in security or infrastructure optimization, can make your business sustainable. The VP Product Platforms is the architect of the stable foundation and scalable core capabilities that all product teams use to build your company’s future.
A VP Product Platforms is still a Product Manager at heart so candidates should be assessed according to your standard PM rubric. However, there are three key areas where the VP Product Platforms should really shine:
1) Prioritization: Everybody in product needs to prioritize, but platform leaders need the wisdom of King Solomon to do it effectively. The VP Product Platforms does not prioritize the customer alone; rather, they arbitrate between features and services requested by customers, regulators, and their peers within the product organization.
How to assess: To get a better understanding of this skillset, ask candidates to share examples of how they’ve tackled challenging trade-offs and how they typically frame those discussions with their peers and/or their teams.
2) Tech Literacy: Product Platform leaders serve as a translation layer between the strategic priorities of the business and the technical and architectural implementation of those priorities.
How to assess: Can the candidate make a case for implementing a new technology or addressing specific technical debt in the context of how it benefits the business? Are they conversant in implementing and optimizing broad business functions that apply to any SaaS business? (e.g., billing, security, notifications, search, information architecture, design systems, etc.)
3) Emotional Intelligence: Managing a product platform upon which one or many products and revenue lines depend is always an exercise in effective change management with a substantial side of influencing without authority.
How to assess: Potential candidates should be able to articulate their approach to change management with examples and outcomes.
Hiring a VP Product Platforms is a strategic investment in your company’s future. To ensure success, focus on candidates who blend ‘traditional’ product management expertise with technical acumen, and a near-infinite curiosity about customer problems and the tech that underpins your company’s solutions.
By hiring a VP Product Platforms, companies can ensure their products meet current demands and are poised for future expansion and innovation. Investing in the right candidate is a strategic decision that can significantly impact the company’s ability to deliver consistent value and maintain a competitive edge in the market.
