VP Product and Alliances at DevZero.io. Mantra: Reach out to help those climbing behind you.
Like Tom Cruise in the "Minority Report", I sense a "pre-crime" to be perpetrated on the Fortune 500 by Chief Product Officers. CEOs, and I don't know who needs to hear this, but CrowdStrike's blind spot in product managing a #platform product cost them $19.4 billion dollars. As we all now know, their technology platform propagated a reliability problem that melted the Fortune 500 and disrupted global travel and commerce. I'm willing to bet my last Meta stock–Sid Palani, my co-author, and I led ML, Data Infra, Reliability and other platforms at Meta–that... ...When massive #outages, #privacy breaches and #reliability problems occur, it's NOT an Engineering fault, it's a systemic failure, and... ...It's because the Product org did not have the #leadership to forestall such a catastrophic change because of lack of experience with platforms. If you are a CPO, it's a Product Management leadership failure to ignore your platforms and focus on surfaces, tools, applications, and consumer apps only. Your platform is an escalator going up and a elevator going down: a platform can uplift your products, but it can also take your company down, fast. And yet, I hear from product leaders about platforms... let me correct that... I hear nothing but lack of awareness about platforms. A SVP Product of a public consumer tech co said to me, blithely, "Let engineering manage the platform that our products are built on". I demurred from joining. I exhorted a F500 consumer entertainment tech co that PMs measure the Platform with reliability KPIs and impact metrics, not as a "reusable library". To no avail, the PM leader, who had prev only done engineering, told me that they felt platform PMs should prioritize documentation. Failure-in-waiting. CPOs feel that they don't need to worry about reliability, security, or other -itys of our product, and that engineering can handle all that tech. Guess again. No, #ChiefProductOfficer, you have to prioritize platform roadmaps and understand how to grow the platform's impact and assure five nines reliability. Crowdstrike's platform had not struck yet, then. It's not the first, nor last. It's just the most expensive platform failure in recent history. This is a wake-up call for CEOs and CIOs at the Fortune 500 who work with vendors who have no accountability for the #PlatformStrategy in place. CIOs, wake up your vendor's CPO at 2 am and demand to know the platform safeguards in place that are well beyond a contract. Sid Palani and I, and with contributions from Alanna Veiga, created this “Blueprint for Platform Product Roadmaps” to get started. We're starting the #PlatformProducts revolution, and thank you CrowdStrike. Our mission is to get tech companies to create the role of a Chief Platform Officer, accountable to customers. Or the next senate hearing will bring the CEOs of F500 companies to testify why they didn't do anything when the next tech platform debacle struck. https://lnkd.in/gHz7nbPw