I started my career working on classroom engagement software and also worked on customer-facing authentication experiences as part of the trust & safety team at Robinhood. However, most of my career as a PM has been spent working on platform products.
There’s no standard categorization of different PM roles, so let me clarify that when I say “Platform Product Managers,” I am referring to PMs who solve problems for groups of individuals (i.e. organizations), not individual users. Organizations often have shared goals but diverse needs, so the product must provide a framework for scalably addressing all of these needs — aka a “platform.” This category includes enterprise SaaS products (Salesforce, Snowflake), but can also include products for small businesses (restaurants) and other types of organizations (hospitals, nonprofits, sports teams, etc).
You could also call them “B2B PMs” but this is (1) a lot of acronyms and (2) not representative of all types of organizations that could use the product.
In contrast, consumer product managers solve problems for individual end users. Instagram, Spotify, the iPhone, and Peloton are all examples of consumer products with individuals as their primary customers.
I’ll cut to the chase — here’s why I think it’s better to be a platform PM than a consumer PM in 2022:
The problems are diverse and challenging
Adoption of consumer technology is approaching saturation and the level of innovation is declining. Mobile devices have been mainstream for well over a decade, and the web2 paradigm has been around for 15–20 years now depending on who you ask. Until a new consumer technology comes around (hello Metaverse? you’re late) future improvements in consumer products will become more and more incremental and continue to trend towards stagnation, leaving fewer opportunities for PMs to work on truly impactful products.
In contrast, the world of ✨platforms✨ has never been more vibrant than it is today. If attention is the fundamental resource consumer PMs trade in, for platform PMs it’s complexity. As new software products emerge and join the ecosystem, complexity tends to increase exponentially, and entirely new classes of problems emerge. These could be technological problems (how do we prove we have something without revealing the thing in question?) or operational problems (how do we keep fully remote teams engaged?) and everything in between.
It feels good to solve these problems
Changes to consumer products tend to have a small impact on a large # of people, whereas changes to platform products tend to have a large impact on a small # of people. This has several second-order effects for PMs working on platform products:
- your customers care deeply about your product because it solves a fundamental but very specific pain they have
- your customers will jump at the opportunity to provide you feedback because improvements to your product can directly impact their day-to-day lives
You can get the dopamine rush of instant feedback much more easily when working on platform products, from people who genuinely give a sh*t about what you’re building.
There are more job opportunities
Consumer technology tends to favour products with strong network effects. Another way of saying this is the better the company is at monopolizing attention, the better they will be at doing so in the future. Given that attention is a finite resource, the number of consumer products that people actually care about remains low, and tends to consolidate over time (see: Meta and Google’s playbook of acquiring companies that can benefit from their vast reach).
As a result, demand for consumer PMs remains low, while the supply of entry-level consumer PMs is inflated by starry-eyed new grads who want to work on something their friends would use.
In contrast, the supply/demand economics of platform PM roles are very favourable. The main goal for platform PMs is to manage complexity, and as new software products emerge and ecosystems emerge, complexity tends to increase exponentially. Naturally, the demand for PMs who can define and tame the complexity also increases. On the supply side, platform PMs often require a significant amount of domain knowledge in order to be successful, so competition is much lower, particularly at the entry to intermediate levels.
In summary…
Complexity will continue to grow and so will the need for platform PMs. If you’re considering a career in PM, think about what kind of products you would enjoy working on. If you’re a long-time consumer PM tired of endless A/B tests and funnel optimizations, consider the multitude of massive unsolved problems that still exist on the platform side! I promise you won’t regret it.
