For Product Managers, Platform Products are extra complicated to lead because there are more internal and external stakeholders to align and collaborate with.

Internally, the critical functions of your product development team expands from just designers, engineers, data scientists, and product marketing to also include Business Development and Partner Engineering.

Externally, you're no longer just creating interaction surfaces for your end-users - you must also create a user experience for your implementing partner; one that guides them, engages them and helps them be successful. Further, your end-user experience is heavily influenced (if not outright controlled) by the implementing partner.

As a result driving alignment, getting predictable timelines, measuring outcomes and iterating are all exponentially more complicated.

You have to be very, very good at communication, narratives, sync meetings, templates, guides, reviews and other alignment tricks to try to manage through the complexity.

In short; you have to be the very best Product Manager you can be.

It's often deeply underestimated just how complicated building a great platform is and how much unique pressure a Product Manager in that position is.