Hey, guys. I’m starting a new PM role over the platform teams at my company and the rules seem like they may be a little different. My customers are the devs and PMs of the product teams. Any of you have experience in this area or know of resources they could share? I’m trying to find some best practices and general tips to start.
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Hello! In some organizations, this position has been named “Internal Product Manager”. I worked in that type of job when I was a “Product Specialist”. There is no difference. Your customers are the internal teams and you should understand their problems & organizational structure.
You can gain the biggest advantage here by strengthening 1-to-1 conversations with the people you work with at the company. They may be more forthright in voicing their problems and needs.
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Hi @Risa, Nice to meet you.
Thank you so much - this is super helpful. I’m curious about how user research and testing prototypes will look. Any tips there?
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As soon as you start the position, you can ask someone you feel close to who from all these teams would be useful to talk to. This person will surely tell you a few people. It will be very useful to question the problems they face and their position when meeting with them. Because after all, they are your customers!
You will probably get very good feedback from some people. These people will also be more open to giving feedback. Especially while creating the roadmap, I was waiting for the internal teams to rank and itemize the information I gained from these interviews, and I was evaluating this list on the prioritization side.
I was holding weekly meetings with each team to actively get information from the processes and learn how it was going so far. Other than that, 1-1 was also a lot. In particular, I was trying to meet with people who wanted to help and who wanted to give valuable feedback. Of course, it is very important to hold them on a regular cycle.
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I love this! Thank you so much, @Risa. I’ll be working on this over the next few weeks.
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Can you give us more details around what aspects of the platform you’ll be managing? Is it a data platform? APIs? Security?
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Thanks, @Karan Yes to all of the above plus Authentication.
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That’s way too big of a scope for one person. Data platform alone can be subdivided into data ingestion data storage, metadata management, data modeling, etc. Security actually encompasses authentication, authorization and other aspects of identity management.
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Lol, it indeed is a lot!
So the data work is something that I’m helping with, but there are apparently others on those systems too, so it’s not primarily my responsibility.
And the way we have it broken up is a team for DevSecOps, one for auth systems, and one for our frontend framework and foundational services.
And these teams have been framed as enablement teams so the idea is to build the frameworks and SDKs and services that other teams need to build their products off of.
I will also add that I have a separate PO (which is different for me) working with me.
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