In my career I have spent a lot of time thinking, talking and building platform and ecosystem products sometimes from o to 1 and other times from 1 to n.This blog is for all the CPOs,C-Levels,VPs,SVPs, product leaders, product managers, design leaders, marketers,BD,sales,strategy and anyone in the technology landscape who wants to understand the why, what and how of Platforms & Ecosystems and how it can take your product and your company to the next level.

Before I jump into the details lets clear out some basics of Platforms & Ecosystem.

Platform

A platform refers to a base technology or software that acts as a foundation upon which other applications, processes, or technologies are developed. In a business context, a platform often facilitates the creation and exchange of goods, services, or social interactions. For example:

• Technology Platforms: Operating systems like Windows ,iOS or payments platforms like Stripe, communications platform like Twilio serve as platforms that support the development and functioning of numerous applications.
• Business Platforms: E-commerce sites like Amazon or service platforms like Uber, which provide a structured environment where multiple users (both consumers and providers) can interact, transact, or exchange services.

Platforms typically provide a toolkit or API (Application Programming Interface) that developers can use to build their applications, enhancing the platform’s utility and accessibility.

Ecosystem

An ecosystem in business refers to the network of interlinked relationships that forms around a platform or company. It includes various stakeholders like suppliers, distributors, consumers, competitors, and even regulatory bodies that interact within the platform’s environment. Key features of a business ecosystem include:

• Collaboration and Competition: Ecosystems often involve both “coopetition” (cooperative competition) and collaboration as businesses work together but also compete.
• Value Creation: Ecosystems facilitate the creation of value through extended services, innovation, and the continuous enhancement of products.
• Diversity: Typically, an ecosystem encompasses a variety of entities, often from different industries, that contribute different products, services, or technologies to the platform.

For example, the Apple ecosystem includes not only its core products like iPhones and Macs but also app developers, accessory makers, service providers (like iCloud), and content producers (like those creating shows for Apple TV+), all of whom contribute to and benefit from the ecosystem.

Relationship Between Platform and Ecosystem

The relationship between a platform and its ecosystem is synergistic. The platform provides the necessary infrastructure and standards around which the ecosystem is built. In turn, the ecosystem helps enhance the platform’s value by broadening its use and encouraging innovation. This dynamic can lead to a powerful feedback loop where enhanced platform capabilities attract more participants to the ecosystem, which then contributes to further platform enhancements.

In summary, platforms are foundational frameworks or services that facilitate interactions and transactions, while ecosystems are the networks of participants that emerge around these platforms, contributing to and deriving value from the platform’s existence. Both concepts are crucial for understanding modern digital strategies and business models. Product companies such as Salesforce had first built a core product (The CRM Suite) and then built a platform & ecosystem around it like the AppExchange where tremendous values gets constantly created in the ecosystem network benefitting both Salesforce and all its ecosystem players.

Now that you understand the basics of what a Platform & Ecosystem is lets dig a little deep into what are its primary components and its core value driver

From a component analysis standpoint a Platforms and Ecosystems — Product Portfolio should have the following ingredients

1. Application Programming Interface(APIs) as Products — This is the core of the platform. Every capability, product or service in the company should be available as well defined APIs, easy to use and integrate-able . These APIs should be dealt like products with attention to detail on schema definition, payload and other API constructs and adhering to the latest API specification such as OpenAPI 3.0 Specification this ensures any developer can comprehend, test and understand your API functionality. You should have dedicated product managers/product team managing these APIs as products. A good example of a company that does it is Stripe https://docs.stripe.com/api.
2. Developer Platform — Once you have the APIs, the world needs a way to know about your APIs, you need a way to distribute your APIs to your users who are developers. In order to do this you need a developer platform that will list all your APIs where developers can read,understand,test and follow guides to build applications using your APIs. A classic example is https://developer.apple.com/. Its an application that guides your users on your product capabilities, how to build apps using your APIs, how to distribute and monetize your apps. At a basic your developer platform should have an API Reference,SDK Reference (If you have an SDK),Developer Guides with examples of how to build for some usecases, ability to test your APIs and most likely a postman collection to copy and test every API on a tool like Postman. The size of your community and ecosystem is directly proportional to the quality of this Developer Platform.
3. API Metering & Billing — Now that you have built great APIs, you need to ensure you can rate-limit your APIs , meter them and bill them for usage appropriately. You need to design a good metering system,API Gateway in place or use a 3rd party API Gateways such as Google Apigee. There are multiple billing systems available in the market for billing and invoicing your API usage. Keep in mind you need to also build a good pricing strategy for usage based pricing (will do a separate topic for API pricing).
4. Partner Program with Partner Tiering — Not all partners are equal, some bring more value than others, some are more strategic than others. With that in mind you need to comeup with a standardized partner tiering program and define Tiers of partners you want to have based on various factors such as business the partner brings, the strategic importance and others. Each tier should have well defined values and each higher tier should have incentives for an ISV/Partner to aim for , example joint marketing,GTM etc. This is where you also need a partner team based on the size of your company. Start with a single person/small team and then grow as your partners grow.
5. Marketplace for Listing and Distributing Apps — This is where your ecosystem gets built and transactions and value creation happens. Marketplace is the place where you will distribute your apps and your developers and 3rd party developers will list and distribute there Apps. Case in point is https://www.apple.com/app-store/ for B2C and https://appexchange.salesforce.com/ for B2B. Marketplace has lot of capabilities such as distribution,marketing,monetization,GTM. There is where the value is captured and exchanges happen.
6. Customer & Developer Community — The value of every ecosystem is built by its community. For a strong platform and ecosystem you need a strong community where your community can voice their requests, hear from you, see your API change logs, comment on bugs,feature requests,vote on issues,organize developer conferences. This community helps to spread the work and a strong community will help you . There is where you can interact directly with your community of developers and evangalists. Case in point is Zoom’s Community Forum https://devforum.zoom.us/. This needs to be supported with a team of product managers,dev-evangalists , anyone in your company who can interact with your developers,ISVs. You need to also keep nurturing this community to help it expand some examples like Hackathons,Major Gift announcements for active participation. This is your own stack overflow.
7. Dev Evangelists — They are literally developers who can market your APIs, SDKs,Solutions. They can write short documentation on some uscases that could be solved using your APIs. They are most important people to help expand your community. Based on the size of your platform you should have a team of people helping on this.
8. Business Development — You need people to establish the relationships with your ISVs, Strategic partners, get into strategic agreement for join-development. These people will help you nurture these partnerships and strategic relationships.
9. Monetization Program — As mentioned earlier you need to identify streams of monetization — API Usage,Marketplace installation, Partner Attribution. There could me many more avenues of monetization. This is a strategic piece that will evolve overtime. You should have a plan in place at least.
10. Partner Marketing & Developer Marketing — Marketing to Developers and ISVs is different from your standard Corp Marketing. You need people who can market to your community of Users,Businesses and Developers and speak and talk in their language. This is very essential to get the vision our, built the brand and grow your ecosystem. The size of the team depends on your company
11. Strategic Integrations — These are the Applications & Integrations that are built and productized by you with key strategic players in your space. These are super strategic and important as these integrations are must for some of your largest customers to access your products. Example if you are in the CCaaS space a productized integration with key CRM players is a must. It involves not only building the integration but also jointly co-developing products and building the roadmap. Here you are using the APIs and SDKs that you have built as apart of the Platform. You will also end up using the APIs and Platform products of your strategic partners.
12. Security & Privacy of the Ecosystem — Ensure you have proper policy guidelines around security and privacy, ensure the date usage of your APIs and how those are used by the 3rd party apps are compliant with the legal framework of the country you are operating. Ensure compliances such as PCI,HIPPA,GDPR etc are adhered to not only by you but by your ISVs and community developers. This will build trust in your platform for the end users of your platforms applications. This is very essential for long term value creation.
13. GTM Machinery — Building an Ecosystem needs a strong Go-To-Market and Sales Machinery. How to Sell your Ecosystem Products, how to perform joint GTM with ISVs, how to manage Resellers, how to work with OEMs, how to put ISVs products on your paper, how does Reseller products supported,sold, all these questions need to be though through and a standard App Publication, GTM process should be in place.
14. Organization wide Platform Product Mindset — Every product that is built in your organization should be built with a platform mindset. This means every product , every capability should have a customer facing API that is available, tested and can be productized. This needs an org-wide mindset set. Keep in mind this is not just your platform team exposing the APIs it means each product team when shipping a product or a feature should think through every feature as a platform feature with a high quality public APIs , with proper scopes,auth baked in so that along with the product/feature the APIs could be exposed in your API Reference and Developer Guides and your community should be trained on the capabilities of your new APIs. This is how you product will have more usage and less churn and your platform and ecosystem will expand.
15. Executive Championship — The platform and ecosystem product should have an C-Level champion so that its strategic in its endeavour and its not starved of resources. This will also ensure the Platform & Ecosystem porfolio is strategically alinged to the Organizational goals.
16. A blueprint of the Platform & Ecosystem Product Portfolio — Your Platform & Ecosystem Product should be at a portfolio level and under that there should be — Platform Products [APIs,SDK,Developer Platforms, Community],Integrations [All Integration Products,including industry specific integrations],Application Marketplace [This is the AppStore product],API Billing & Metering[Managing the API Billing , Metering & Pricing],Privacy & Security . Each product portfolio will have a dotted relationship with Platform & Ecosystem Portfolio

Weather you are a SaaS company and trying to build a long lasting company or a XPaaS trying to build a massive company or you are a social network trying to build a community or a company building the next generation AI platform. Make sure you design your product org strategically and have a high and strategic importance to Platform & Ecosystem portfolio. It will take your company to the next level of greatness.

Bill Gates has a quote “ A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” (source — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-platform-you-want-know-dont-believe-technology-firm-barry-rabkin/)

Go and build a great Platform & Ecosystem portfolio!!!!