Platform
Being a Platform PM
Last Post: 31 Oct 2022I’ve spent a lot of time as a platform product manager. At Splunk I managed the app certification platform that Splunkbase and Cloud relied on. Later I helped build the platform services for Splunk Cloud Services from the ground up. At Tanium I managed the Tanium Data Service which served as a common data layer for all of our modules.
Being the PM for a deeply technical platform team can be really hard. Unless you come from a deeply technical background it feels hard to have a way to helpfully contribute to that effort. A lot of the work that gets done by a platform team will be very in the weeds, or will be in close execution with the consumer up the stack and their PM on the problem you are trying to solve. You are also more removed from the end-user of the product, which can make empathy and understanding harder. That can make you feel like a glorified project manager.