Data Platform Product: Goals and Typical North Stars

In this series, we have looked at:

Introduction to data platform product management

Who are data platform customers?

Now that we have established the context of the customer and the position of the data platform in the overall “stack”, let’s take a look at the typical goals of a platform organization.

If you are working in a platform organization, you are most likely going to be in a department which is a cost center

This puts you in a tricky spot because you will have to continuously justify your existence, more than product managers who manage revenue-generating products. It also means investments in your products will come slowly and with a lot of scrutiny, which you may say is unfair, and I won’t argue with you there.

So how do you justify your existence when you cannot piggyback on something that impacts the company’s top line? Well, you guessed it — focus on improving the bottom line.

Being in a platform organization with typically large software and services budgets will give you a unique opportunity to impact costs in a way that can directly affect a company’s bottom line. This is especially true with data infrastructure and platforms, and even more so when data platforms are in the public cloud.

A small optimization in resource consumption can lead to a huge savings.

Back to goals — besides cost savings, one other area which is completely in your control as a platform product manager is improving developer productivity. Your aim is to make it easier for your customers to do their jobs. Help them do their jobs faster. Skip unnecessary steps. Introduce innovation in your products, so they don’t have to learn new stuff all the time as new technologies emerge. If you are able to move the needle in developer experience and productivity, you will get implicit and explicit support from your customers. This support will not only help justify your existence, but as you will see in later articles in this series, it will help in establishing good partnerships across the organization.

As enabler, your products should get out of the way of the customers’ main job — writing queries, analyzing data, creating visualizations, training machine learning models, etc.

The third category of goals to target as a platform organization is the least sexy one. It is keeping your platform compliant with internal and external legal, privacy and compliance obligations and all of the InfoSec-mandated security practices and policies. As a product manager, you can build a lot of checks and balances into your products to play the compliance game on offense (making the platform compliant when it may be out of compliance) and defense (proactively keeping compliance).

One of the biggest challenges in dealing with this area is interpretation of the regulations, and negotiations with legal staff on how far the platform should go in terms of keeping compliance. This is a struggle which you as a product manager will have to not only navigate but in many cases, facilitate so that there is a balance between everything becoming impossible to use and the company blatantly violating regulations and being at risk of brand reputation, fines and more.

Once you have negotiated how far you want to go with compliance, you can work with the Data Governance, Legal, Privacy and/or InfoSec teams to determine the goals you can set for the platform and map your products’ features to move towards your goals.

The final point on goals is building products which implement recommended system and data architecture patterns to keep the platform nimble and extensible. There may not be a hard metric to track on this one, but it is very important that your products help make the platform better by reducing chaos and streamlining infrastructure.

Once you identify one or more of these goals, it will become much easier for you to align your products’ key strategic plans to realize those goals, critical features, and associated roadmaps. Heck, you may even be able to make the case for innovative ideas and products.

To summarize, the platform product manager can demonstrate impact of their products by aligning the product strategy to meet goals along the following pillars:

• Cost management and savings: keep a North Star of saving a certain amount or shaving a certain % of the current spend.
• Developer productivity: keep a North Star here in terms of time saved in doing a certain job and it can be used to aggregate total time saved (# of developers impacted x number of times they do this activity x total savings). This will not show on anyone’s books as money that can be banked, but it is something that can show your products moving some important needles.
• Compliance: determining a North Star in this pillar is more difficult and it could be very long-term like all personal data will be anonymized 100% of the time, or very tactical like all our data will be compliant with CCPA v2 when it goes live on a specified date.

Next, we will look at your partners and collaborators since you will need their help to move forward as an organization.