Lessons Learned About Platform Strategy

The following articles offer valuable insights into the successes and failures of various platforms.

MIT Sloan Management Review: Platform strategy, explained
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/platform-strategy-explained

Harvard Business Review: 6 Reasons Platforms Fail
https://hbr.org/2016/03/6-reasons-platforms-fail

Harvard Business Review: Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don’t
https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-some-platforms-thrive-and-others-dont

In my opinion, the lesson that we can learn from these platform success/failure stories is that it was not mere persistence or luck that pulled off the magic. Some of the interesting questions that one might consider when crafting a rigorous platform strategy are as below:

i) Does the platform form an ecosystem that enables the building of global network effect clusters instead of local network effect clusters?

ii) Does the platform offer mutual benefits to both platform owners and platform participants in order to foster long term loyalty (platform stickiness)?

iii) Does the platform allow platform participants to benefit from the presence of others? According to an article published on MIT Sloan Management Review, in traditional competitive strategy, it is generally assumed that customers can determine their willingness to pay for the product or service independently. This assumption breaks down when MIT studying platforms, as platform participants’ participation is interdependent with the choices of other users.

iv) Does the platform vision able to avoid the temptation of "Flagship Product Centric" thinking and keep on experimenting the expansion of ecosystem into the adjacent business opportunities with new product offering?

v) Does the platform owner capable to coordinate the behaviors of multiple parties that might not know each other, that might not even want to know each other in order to ensure certain level of ecosystem coherence?