👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's most remarkable stories at the intersection of #ecosystem #innovation and #platform #organisation.
10 Learnings About Platforms
Traditional thinking is that platforms are about efficiency. Product teams get a bunch of functionality for free from the platform and only have to build the remaining product specific functionality. In practice, the interface between products and the underlying platform tends to be incredibly complex and tends to result in a situation where the platform slows everyone down. To address this, we should design platforms and the ways of working around platforms to maximize speed.
👨🏻🏫 Jan Bosch, Professor of Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and his amazing learnings. Having the right mindset comes through in all of them.
The Atomic Network
To build an atomic network requires a hodgepodge of different tools. Common themes emerge when you look at Slack’s strong network launch as well as the successes across marketplaces, social networks, developer platforms, and dozens of other categories. Many of them are counterintuitive: The networked product should be launched in its simplest possible form—not fully featured—so that it has a dead simple value proposition. The target should be on building a tiny, atomic network—the smallest that could possibly make sense—and focus on building density, ignoring the objection of “market size.”
🕸️ Lenny Rachitsky presents an exclusive excerpt from the book Cold Start Problem and it's all about networks!
The Decentralized Country
If we believe that value will increasingly accrue to the digital world over the physical one, it seems that DeCos that devote themselves to the former will capture most power. In that respect, I think the most influential DeCos touch as little land as possible, and ideally none. Rather than outright exterminate the concept of nations, DeCos will sit above them, using their social and financial capital to guide terrestrial policies. At various times in human history, states and empires have allowed themselves to be jockeyed by religious organizations that professed unique powers; DeCos should be able to make a similar claim.