Natural Evolution of a consumer product
By: Himanshu Singh
Tags: Product Vision, Strategy, Product Management, Vision

When someone speaks about product vision and platform versus product, there are just number of thoughts that rush to a product manager’s mind. But what happens next when you have built a consumer product or typically a marketplace. The short answer, in most of the cases, is a platform. This is something I have learnt from my own experience in last 1.5 years. But before I delve into how platform is a natural evolution of a consumer product with some examples and my own experience, let me share my thoughts on what is the distinction between a product and a platform.

Product vs Platform

As per couple of google searches, one can easily see that product is usually associated with a single revenue stream while a platform is associated to multiple revenue streams while enabling multitude of interactions between two distinct user groups via different channels.

Explaining with some examples:

You would have heard of a number of cars that share same platform (aka a system of chassis, transmission, engine and probably a bunch of other things) what changes is the final look and feel of the car, probably its price to an extent and the interaction between the car users and the car.

One very famous platform likely is the Facebook platform. Facebook started off as a product that met the needs of socializing for its users. Over a period of time, it naturally evolved into a platform where there are multiple product streams that interact with each other and with whom their respective users interact in different ways. For majority of the digital platforms, their backbone is the user profile and the user data since that allows for generating different revenue streams and enables seamless interaction among different products leveraging the platform.

How does a consumer product evolve into a platform and the vision is formed

When one is starting on a product building journey, the picture of a platform may or may not be clear. You obviously start off with problem(s) or unmet need(s) that your target user segment faces or has. You build the product and then you iterate on the product until you have achieved a PMF and probably you have started growing. Then comes the question of what’s next, where do you take it from there?

One of the possible journeys would be to get more offerings and more features in your product but most likely your users would loose interest in your product over a period of time. Thus you start enriching the user profile in terms of the different kind of interactions they have had with your product and what other information you can get. Then you start thinking of what are parallel offerings that your users can have aligned with your original product. For example: if you think of fintech wallets in India such as Paytm. They started off with just a wallet that you could use for your regular purchases. Later, they brought in more offerings such as payment gateways, other products that can be bought digitally all leveraging their original wallet product and now they have a user’s financial data that they are now leveraging to build a full stack payments platform.

Journey of Workex

Similar has been our journey at Workex. Obviously I joined Workex quite late in their product journey but right before their platform journey.

Workex began with an aim to solve hiring problem faced by different small and medium businesses employing the typical unskilled to semi-skilled workforce. After having solved this problem and powering hiring for a multitude of well known brands such as Zomato, Swiggy, Uber, etc., we also had this question ahead of us.

A lot of brainstorming led us to figure out our path. What emerged as a vision for us now sounds very intuitive and natural in the hindsight — A livelihood platform for Bharat. During our brainstorming we realized that to build more trust on our hiring marketplace and to add more value to our target user segments’ lives, we need to create digital visibility of their work. Which meant that their employers ought to manage them on Workex, these workforce need to view their attendance, salary on Workex. With this, the digital work profile of the workforce is created which is, to an extent, verified. This puts Workex on a journey of becoming India’s first livelihood platform where these workforce have access to more than 100K+ job vacancies in India and have all their work information present on the same platform. This allows Workex to leverage the built information and empower these workforce to improve their livelihood over a period of time via several tools deriving out of the platform.

My learnings

To determine the vision of a consumer product right after achieving the PMF and in the growth phase, think of all problems or workflows of your user segments that can be solved or done digitally and use your product’s core offering or augment it. This in most cases will give more ideas around what to do next and after some time give you a clear vision towards a platform relevant in your market space.