Data Platform Product Management: Your Closest Partners
This post continues the data platform product management series with a look at your closest partners and enablers.
Prior posts in this series:
With that background, let us explore who are going to be your allies in your product journey, since you will need them to buy into your vision and help you sell the same to the extended stakeholder community.
Architecture
As we have seen earlier, since the platform customers are technically savvy and since the products themselves are very technical in nature, the product manager’s success will lie in being ahead of the customer and providing them recipes for success based on how the industry is moving. The product manager needs to ensure they can convert the technical moves of the industry into the benefits the first-degree customers and end customers will see through those technological advances.
In this area, the product manager should leverage their architecture counterparts to advance the state of the art.
This could be doing POCs of modern technologies, vetting design patterns before implementing solutions to make things easier for the customers, and also, reviewing the architecture of the product itself.
It is imperative that the platform product manager leverage architects as much as they can. The partnership is symbiotic: a product manager takes architecture POCs or patterns and operationalizes them, and architects can provide design patterns and implementation best practices so that the product managers can incorporate those in their product development process.
Governance
To address products and features in the “third pillar” of goals, related to compliance, a platform product manager will need to leverage the data governance team as an extension of the product management function. In this scenario, the data governance team will work with the legal, privacy and regulatory compliance teams as business customers and translate their requirements into technically implementable pieces.
As I have alluded to in the earlier post, this area requires a strong collaboration between the data governance team interpreting regulations around the world, while product manager negotiating the implementation of the said regulations.
A healthy partnership between data platform PM and data governance would lead to data governance having confidence that their requirements will be implemented to make the platform “compliant by design”, while the product manager can be assured of proper interpretation of the laws by the data governance team working with Legal, Privacy, Security and Compliance.
Engineering
This is a no-brainer — to get the products built as per their vision, a platform PM will need to partner very well with engineering.
Platform engineering is a curious engineering organization much like a platform product management organization is. One of the reasons I say this is that an extensive portion of a data platform engineering organization is operations-focused rather than product-focused. This is because they are responsible for “running” vendor products and their goals are mostly around keeping the lights on and reducing/preventing major incidents and their blast radius.
In other words, this organization is typically on a journey from the old way of doing things to a new way of doing things.
As customers demand more from the data platforms, the platform engineering organization will realize that they cannot scale unless they change the way they work. Productizing the infrastructure is one way to scale, giving self-service capabilities which allow appropriate use of the infrastructure while maintaining compliance and consumption guard rails.
As a product manager, of course you need a strong engineering organization as your partner so that you can build products and features to move the needles you have set to move and accomplish to the various goals you set for the organization.
Program Management
Note: I had completely missed program management in my earlier version of this post. Someone reminded me about it, so I am adding this section since they are right, program management is another critical partner.
Since most of platform product work impacts a broad audience of customers and stakeholders, it is critical to have all the ducks in a row at all time. Program management or technical program management becomes a vital partner for a data platform product manager since they help the teams stay aligned to the committed delivery and raise concerns as they arise.
In some ways, the overlap between product management and program management is the most observed in the platform world because a lot of the platform product work needs coordination across multiple cross-functional teams.
Besides these three key partners listed above, of course you need to work with other partners like your business-focused product management peers, and other business functions not typically covered by a product manager, like Financial Operations (FinOps), Procurement, Legal (for software licensing and new tool approvals), etc.
I hope this gives you a good idea of where you as a platform product manager need to focus so you have the right support in the organization to enable transformations to make things better for the data platform customers in your organization.
Next, we will dive into what you need to succeed as a data platform product manager, having set up the context of your customers, product goals and key partners.
