Bad idea: Platforms automatically improve productivity.

As I’ve said previously, productivity is the ratio of the value of Impact to the cost of Effort.

Productivity = Value of Impact ($) / Cost of Effort ($)

Platforms improve productivity by reducing the cost of effort.

There are two main ways platforms reduce the cost of effort:

• Consolidating operating costs.
• Enabling reuse of capabilities rather than teams having to build them from scratch.

How platforms reduce cost of effort

For example, the small team building Threads reused data models, business logic, security features, and server infrastructure from Instagram allowing them to go “from zero to 100 million people in record time with no major downtime.” This is the promise of platforms.

The reality of platforms doesn’t always match.

Just because it’s called a “platform” doesn’t automatically mean it reduces the cost of effort.

It’s relatively easy to (unintentionally) design a platform that makes productivity worse:

• Teams are buried with ongoing, required migrations, especially with limited flexibility in timing.
• Too many constraints that makes feature development more difficult and/or features less capable.
• The platform team is a bottleneck due to lack of self-service.

How platforms don’t reduce the cost of effort

Platforms as products improve productivity; “because I said so” platforms do not.

If product teams had the choice, would they use the platform capability?

This question is what “platform-as-a-product” is about.

When product teams have the choice, or platform teams act as if product teams have the choice, the platform capabilities tend to improve productivity.

When “platform teams” act as if product teams have no choice in the matter, the platform capabilities tend to make productivity worse.