Data Platform Products’ Customers
This is a continuation of the series I am writing about data platform product management and its nuances. I introduced myself and this series in an earlier post. We will go into understanding the type of customers a platform product manager has to work with.
Unlike a traditional, end-user facing product, a platform product is usually consumed by a developer or someone playing the role of a developer.
In the world of data, analysts and data scientists form a large customer group and this group does not seem like a “developer” group. However, their use of the core data platform is akin to a developer or engineer — writing queries, scheduling pipelines, orchestrating their pipelines, monitoring their processes, troubleshooting issues with the pipelines or with the data, etc.
The reason I want to call this out is to signify that the customers are more technically savvy than many other products’ customers. They are very demanding, and expect you to stay one step ahead of them in terms of knowing where the industry is going, what the new technologies do (and don’t) and how and when they can start leveraging those technologies.
Given the data platform is a horizontal area, anyone and everyone in the organization can be your customer
Another way to look at the customer is that given the data platform is a horizontal area, anyone and everyone in the organization can be your customer. Consider for example a data platform like BigQuery or Snowflake. The most critical data assets of the company are going to be stored in these platforms, whether in raw format or modeled. This means that the engineering team which uses this data to build their data products uses the platform as also the business user who clicks on a Tableau report link which in turn may execute queries in the same data platform.
Another angle on the customer is that the end user of the data platform is often one or two degrees away from the platform product. For example, there could be a team which creates a foundational data layer and another team which creates business-specific datasets which are finally consumed by a business team. Of course all three of these groups — the data engineering team, the department engineering team and the business end user — are the data platforms customers, but as a product manager, if you want to maximize the business impact you may need to understand not just your direct customers and their challenges. but several layers of customers and their challenges.
As a platform product manager, if you want to maximize the business impact you may need to understand not just your direct customers and their challenges. but several layers of customers and their challenges.
Speaking of impact, because platform products are one or two (and sometimes more) degrees away from the actual business value delivery, a product manager has to figure out a way to find proxies for business value to communicate the impact of their products. This is because the platform’s product may provide benefit in a small way to many business deliverables so you can’t take direct credit for all those wins, but if there is a way to indirectly link the business win to the platform feature or capability, you will have a much better discussion about the value of your product.
To summarize, these are some of the key aspects of a platform product manager’s customer profile and its impact:
- The customer is very technically savvy
- The customer often leads the way in terms of innovation, and expects you to keep up or better, be the leader in introducing new concepts and technologies
- The customer could be in any business function and any business unit, especially with data platforms since data is critical to make any business decision these days
- The customer is one, two, and maybe even more than two degrees away from you, making relationship-building more challenging
- The business impact of your products is usually not directly quantifiable. This means one of your goals as a platform product manager is to find proxies to the business impact which you can directly influence
Next, I will dive into what should be your products’ goals and what can you use as your typical North Stars?
While this is the norm in many companies, I do not like the term “stakeholder” as a way to describe a “customer”. While customers are naturally stakeholders in your product, I like to think of the users of the product as a customer even if they are not actually paying for the product. Nothing wrong in referring to them as stakeholders in the appropriate context like in a business review meeting or organization-level prioritization calls, but in the context of a product, they are customers.
