When Platforms Outsmart Products: Rethinking Deliverables in the Digital Age

13 Mins Read: Products or platforms – both have existed in the digital economy for some time now. For many businesses, the product-led approach is a fairly new concept. But while you were transitioning from project-led to product-based, the market leaned towards the other front – platform-led delivery. Is it meant for you? How are platforms outsmarting products now? Our CEO, Divyesh Patel delves deep into the subject, so you aren’t left out in the revolution. Explore now!

From transactional project-driven delivery to continuous product-led delivery models – you thought winning product lifecycles was all you needed for organic growth? If I am to spill the beans, let me tell you there’s something more on the horizon – platform thinking. And while it has been here for a while now, I'll explain right here why it's gaining momentum now.

The movement from project-based to platform-led delivery is happening because more and more businesses have got caught in what we call ‘a structural drag’. Technology, which was a nimble enabler of frictionless delivery, got complicated with newer teams, expanded products and markets.

Most businesses in the high-growth environment are now realizing that their growth has outpaced structure. As their teams chase new functionalities for newer customer belts, they find their internal systems (APIs, identity services, deployment tools, data pipelines) too closely coupled or highly fragmented for the original use cases.

This is where platform thinking brings structure. How? We’ll explore together.

How Do You Know Product Thinking Is Stressing Your System?

There was a time when even at Radixweb, we assumed product-led delivery was the “ultimate cut”! However, delving deeper into it, examining our own processes and that of our peers, I realized where the flaw was – for most of our businesses, “product thinking” remained stuck at the touchpoint level. Leaders and product owners focused on building end user-facing features and iterated on feedback. But this thinking stopped right there, didn’t go any deeper.

This is when I observed that:

• Our engineering teams had begun duplicating functionalities as shared services were too occupied or highly complex for defining a new usage.
• Our product launches started getting delayed because product teams were internally struggling with tooling scarcity and undue dependencies.
• We, the decision makers, began gradually pausing at the thought of innovation because rebuilding/enhancing capabilities felt risky and costly. I knew we needed a new digital strategy to achieve sustainable success.

This had to stop!

Gradually I came to the realization that the real game was in capabilities and if businesses were to succeed in the longer run, they have to capitalize on modular business logic that enabled multiple products and services parallelly. Say ML and data pipelines, quote engines, document search and generation, inventory auditing mechanisms, etc.

My observations were:

• Don’t treat capabilities as infrastructures; they’ll lose their scalability, your teams will lose ownership and clarity.
• You must treat capabilities as products. Make them reusable assets to keep them strategically flexible, risk free, and to speed up delivery.

What is Platform Thinking at Its Core?

Like I said earlier, platforms are quite a well-travelled territory. We are only realizing its potential in a newer light now. A platform isn’t your in-house toolkit or even a backend – it’s a structure. And platform thinking is the way of structuring your organizational capabilities in a way that they enhance speed, security and scalability of your entire organization.

So, how do platforms help your business?

Platforms are outsmarting products – by changing the fundamentals of innovation, scalability and growth. Here’s how:

• Rapid Scalability: If it’s you vs. your network. Who do you think would bring more accumulated advantages? Products, controlled by you, scale in a linear way. However, platforms are co-created and co-managed by your ecosystem – developers, partners, and customers. So, they have the potential to scale exponentially. If scalability is the most pressing issue for your business, you might want to explore my guide on scaling and adapting for sustainable growth.
• Data Becomes Your Strategic Asset: While product thinking boasts of quick feedback integration, it cannot monitor every interaction and iterate that frequently. Platforms survive on operational data where every small interaction generates intelligence for the system, enhancing predictive analytics, feature customization, and smart decisioning.
• Sticky User Experience: Your products are highly customer-focused, extensively tailored to solve customer problems. Your platforms, on the other hand, would be dealing with challenges faced by all your stakeholders – from developers to end-users. They build higher interconnectedness, amplify positive experience across the stakeholder ecosystem, and build deep loyalty.

The best part of platform thinking is that it would considerably reduce your coordination and cognitive loads for creating customer-facing products. The way I see it, they are the most sustainable opportunity to scale. In a product mindset, individual teams in your process were solving the same foundational challenges separately. With platform-based delivery, your organization would have a common ground where challenges are resolved for the entire business needs.

Platforms make your systems more agile, enabling continuous delivery without the need for rebuilding the whole architecture and creating stable, base-line abstractions for common facilities like experiments, monitoring, authentication and defined access, payment gateways, content customizations, etc.

I’ll give you a more interesting view. In platform-based delivery, “product thinking” is very deeply integrated. How? It calls your platform product managers to think beyond their traditional role. They place themselves at the convergence of business value and technical architecture to observe and understand the following areas:

• Gauge the requirements of end-users and in-house stakeholders as well.
• Chalk out priority on the basis of enablement, reusability, and measurable impact.
• Maintain high discoverability through documentation for internal services.
• Look beyond uptime – uphold delivery speed, adoption, and satisfaction rates as metrics of success.

It goes without saying that until now, most organizations had adopted only the superficial layer of product thinking. But this is where it gets real – when you apply this length of product thinking to your systems, your tech platforms perform swifter and deliver better.

And without this level of product thinking for platforms, you stay stuck in the same loop:

• Poor developer experiences from duplicated efforts.
• Fragmented systems that need differentiated maintenance.
• Slow time-to-value because of unevolved features and capabilities.

Is Platform Strategy and Development Meant for You?

Platform thinking, because of its solution-driven approach, is spiraling into the best option for next-gen delivery. However, I have observed, it is now working best for businesses operating on the following patterns:

• Multi-faceted Business Models: If your business offers multiple product lines having differentiated workflows for diverse customer segments.
• Multi-channel Operational Model: If you strive to reach customers across diverse channels within a single buying journey.

The platform model works best for businesses operating in a highly complex business environment because it solves the problems of multiple stakeholders in one centralized effort. It sorts business operations across several workflows and channels, amplifying the effect of expansion while simplifying scaling through technology.

You can ask yourself these questions to assess if you’re ready for the platform revolution:

• Will you help several parts of your organization by centralizing core capabilities?

Platforms aren’t meant for one-directional use; they benefit several functions. If your business functions benefit from shared, common functionalities, only then is platform-led delivery for you. Else, you’ll be incurring unrequired costs.

• Is your product-market fit standardized?

Platforms will create centralized small parts of base-line functionalities that can be tailored and reused to serve flexibility for individual teams.

• Are your internal stakeholders on board have shared foundational capabilities?

As a business leader, bringing in this consensus is crucial, else your business will face an in-house adoption challenge that no amount of scaling can solve.

• Are you ready to risk a deep investment?

Businesses that run on quick fixes will never succeed at platform-led delivery. For them, lighter investment in COTS is the best bet to have stability. Platform-led delivery questions your foundational capabilities and restructures them for futuristic use, for which you may not find an immediate usage. It’s a preparation of your systems for the future.

So, if you’re ready, let’s get a roundup of the future for platform-led delivery – the way I see it!

The Future is Ecosystem Intelligence - Converge Platformization + AI

The next part in the platform revolution sparkles with AI-led ecosystem intelligence. This means your transactions aren’t just more customized, secured, and proactive. It means that your platforms learn to think – predict user needs before demand arises, rapidly adjust and tailor offerings for each user, and deliver real-time streamlining of supply chains. Platform thinking coupled with AI-led capabilities, blockchain, and IoT intelligence will birth autonomous systems that sustain and maintain themselves automatically and do not meet market needs, as they shape demands as well down the line. The future of technology is not just AI – AI-led capabilities are just enablers of more rapid growth. The crux lies in how you leverage these enablers to taior growth for your core business vision. This may help.

What’s in the Future of Platform Economy?

1. Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) boom for innovation with heavy-on-the-pocket infrastructure investments.
2. Blockchain for decentralized, trust-less platform ecosystems for distributed transaction and governance in healthcare, finance, and supply chain industries.
3. Modular, API-first, composable platforms that treat core capabilities like lego blocks – easy to reuse, recompose, integrate and scale.
4. AI and data-driven platforms with hyper-personalization, analytics, and auto-decisioning.