Insight by Lionel Martin, our technology consultant

I've found that a recurring bias in team conversations is what I call the "Platform mindset". I think this mindset potentially causes a disservice and limits thinking. I'd like to challenge each and every one into considering a different mental model for Product design. My suggestion is to start thinking in terms of Pipes.

"If the description of your start up has the word “platform” in it, there’s a better description that doesn’t"

— Paul Graham

The word platform means many different things to many people. The tech industry has been guilty of using the term loosely to describe API-first products, Software-as-a-service, aggregators and sometimes real platforms. The truth is, most businesses calling themselves Platforms aren't. Platforms derive much of their value from the communities they serve. Without an extensive community, one can't be a platform.

"This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform."

— Bill Gates

As engineers in a hyperactive tech world, we must be aware of two biases of ours that can make us Platform-obsessed. Firstly, and let's be honest, most of us engineers love the myth of thinking, designing and building One Big Software Thing that, once developed, would become indispensable to users if we were to own and operate it, because that makes us feel smart. Secondly, a large part of our tech culture is based on watching - from very far away - the rise of complex tech businesses such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb who seemingly feature Platform business models even though we have close to no idea of the myriad of mechanisms of growth at play. This creates a confirmation bias and reinforces our first bias and the Platform mental model.

Personally I've never liked the word platform. A platform, by its very nature, is uninspiring in a business sense. Platforms are inert. They are static. And they do little more than just exist. Even an oil-drilling platform, while impressive at first glance, is immovable, cumbersome and almost impossible to upgrade. They do not evolve and are doomed to be obsolete after sucking all of the value out of their market. Not an inspiring vision for business!

The alternative to being platform-obsessed is to become customer-obsessed which is only possible when we think in terms of Pipes, not Platforms.

So here's another way to think of Products. Anyone in business is in the business of customer state management. We take customers from state A to state B, from "stranger" to happy customer.

That change is progressive and dynamic; it never happens by placing a customer to stagnate on a platform. Our customer goes on a journey, a journey we can picture as a Pipe. A marketing-minded person might call these Pipe funnels but this mental model applies very well to every part of every business.

In a marketing or sales funnel, every lead is in a known state, anywhere from cold to closed. For a Platform-obsessed person, there are only two polarised states: signed up or not, otherwise known as user or non-user. A Pipe-obsessed person, on the other hand, has transcended that binary mindset and sees the myriad of micro-state changes while prospects and customers flow down the business's Pipes: strangers in, happy customers out, and all the micro-states in between.

"Pipes have been around us for as long as we’ve had industry. They’ve been the dominant model of business. Firms create stuff, push them out and sell them to customers. Value is produced upstream and consumed downstream. There is a linear flow, much like water flowing through a pipe."

— Sangeet Paul Choudary

Pipes are a much more natural way of thinking about business, and yet, Platform-minded people still aim to deliver One Big Thing. Great business builders and operators, on the contrary, think and describe their companies in terms of state machines such as “When a customer does this, then we do that” or "We help X achieve Y by providing Z". They have a plan — and a system — for every required customer state change, to the point that it is all Standard Operating Procedures across the company (which effectively is the Product). This delights the customer (and the prospect, but that’s for another discussion) and brings scalability to the business since it doesn’t laboriously serve each customer and can, therefore, focus on growth. By focusing on the customer state changes rather than building and pushing their One Big Thing, great businesses stay market-driven instead of marketing-driven.

Our mission — as Product people — is to define all of these when-then statements and lead our teams into shipping software, content, and systems — i.e. Pipes — that relentlessly embody these statements and move customers, one state at a time, down our overall service Pipes. I have yet to meet a thriving Product team which hadn't had to make the shift from a Platform- to a Pipe-mindset under enough pressure.

So I challenge us, the next time we are tempted to make a decision from a Platform-mindset perspective, the next time we find ourselves focusing too hard on what the One Big Thing we could design, build, own and then operate is... to challenge our thinking with a Pipe-mindset perspective and be brutally honest about what the most affordable solution is to simply move our customers, at scale, from their current state to their desired state and nothing more.