Platform Design Toolkit Bootcamp — Field Notes
Music is my passion, and I lived my dream in my twenties during the early 2000s, touring the world with my band Sodastream. We spent more time in Italy than any other country, and a phenomenon I encountered there which I didn’t observe anywhere else in the world was that of collectives of people forming cultural associations that would organise activities in their city, including concerts for international touring acts. Sometimes these groups had commandeered an unusual building or were squatting, and often were receiving cultural funding from the local government to run events.
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These dynamics created a very different atmosphere to a normal concert. For example, it was common at these shows that once load in and soundcheck had been completed, a long table would be set up in front of the stage and the whole organising team together with the artists would sit down to eat a meal (always pasta) that someone had cooked at the venue. We would all eat together until the table was packed up just minutes before the venue doors opened and the punters streamed in, ready for the show.
This created an experience for me as an artist that felt very different to a standard commercial transaction where we’d simply be paid a fee to play. Rather, I felt immersed in an ecosystem where there was a multidirectional exchange going on. The lines were blurred between who was an artist, a fan, crew, an organiser, or a venue operator. Rather, we were all in it together, sometimes switching roles, and creating an experience that we all cared about.
Little did I know it at the time, but that was my early taste of a different way of approaching business.
Fast forward to the 2020s and platforms and ecosystems are emerging as a significant type of business model. Think about the likes of Uber and AirBNB as prominent textbook examples of platforms — these organisations don’t offer products and services directly to their customers, but rather facilitate the exchange of value between different groups of participants in an ecosystem they have created and continue to operate.
Given the rise of platforms and the incredible potential I can see for them in the future, I recently took the plunge and attended a four day bootcamp to go deep on the topic, and to become a certified facilitator in the use of the Platform Design Toolkit (PDT). This post provides a summary of my experience and reflections.
The bootcamp was run by Boundaryless, who are the creators of the PDT. Based in Italy and led by Simone Cicero, they have been on the journey of exploring platforms since around 2013. In more recent times, Boundaryless have broadened their focus beyond platforms to explore how the concepts extend to organisational development (another favourite topic of mine). Their newly minted Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization (EEEO) toolkit unpacks the organisational design that enables innovative companies such as the Haier Group and Zappos to have internal networks of “Micro Enterprises”.
The Platform Design Toolkit is a set of concepts and canvases that facilitate the exploration of a multisided platform business model. I am a long time user and advocate of Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas and associated tools, and Boundaryless make no secret of the fact that PDT builds on their shoulders. A strength and focus of Strategyzer’s tools is that they make innovation concepts simple and accessible. Multisided platforms, however, embody a significant degree of complexity with several distinct roles including:
Platform Owners: those who own the vision behind the platform and are responsible for ensuring that it exists and thrives — e.g. Uber, AirBnB, Apple, Wordpress.
Peer Consumers: those who consume or access value — e.g. riders on Uber, guests on AirBnB, iPhone users.
Peer Producers: often “prosumers” or individuals seeking to supply value into the ecosystem or marketplace — e.g. drivers on Uber, hosts on AirBnB, individual developers who create iOS apps for Apple App Store.
Partners: those seeking to create value by playing a more professional and strategic role in the ecosystem — e.g. super hosts on AirBnB, commercial companies creating iOS apps, Wordpress theme developers.
While companies playing the Platform Owner role still have to consider their own business model (i.e. how they will generate revenue and grow sustainably), their main goal is shaping the platform ecosystem. This involves enabling the direct and efficient exchange of value between producers, consumers and partners, by providing the support and infrastructure for them to do so.
Some key concepts in platform design which highlight the complexity involved include:
The (famous) chicken and egg problem: if a platform relies on an exchange of value between producers and consumers, how does one get started? One or the other has to come first, and there are strategies to manage this such as “single player mode” whereby a product or service offering initially attracts and grows one side of the marketplace.
Building the learning engine: in addition to creating the transaction engine, a really interesting aspect of platforms is the learning engine that helps with onboarding, getting better on the platform and catching new opportunities — e.g. teaching people to level up as AirBnB hosts with tutorials on how to take great photos, or illuminating the pathway from Uber rider to driver (to turn consumers into producers).
Designing for disobedience and embracing emergence: given the evolutionary and participatory nature of platforms, Platform Owners need to embrace governance models that enable them to respond to the behaviours and opportunities that emerge. It can’t be assumed that people will continue to simply transact as initially imagined, but rather they will “hack the system” to solve new problems, and these opportunities must be embraced rather than resisted. For example, Uber Eats apparently started as a hack of people using Uber in a way that wasn’t intended, and rather than being shut down this was embraced to create a whole new dimension to the platform.
Hopefully these examples illuminate how platform design involves many more considerations in contrast to traditional product development, and hence the need for the more expansive tools, as the PDT offers, which enables unpacking and experimenting with these additional concepts.
I’ll save a deeper dive on the background and application of the PDT for a future post, as I’d like to share more about the actual experience of attending the bootcamp.
Format and stats
- Online: Thanks to the pandemic (and luckily for me, being based in Australia), the bootcamp was run online rather than face to face in northern hemisphere cities as it has been previously.
- Four days: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday
- Session length: 6.5 hours including some short breaks.
- Time: 12 pm to 6.30 pm CET, which meant 10pm — 4:30am for me in Melbourne (during my aforementioned years as a working musician I spent many periods working the night shift in printing factories. So I was glad to discover I hadn’t lost the knack of sleeping before and after “shifts”!!)
- Participants: 36 participants from all around the world, primarily Italy and Europe, some from USA, and one other person based in Perth, Australia.
- Facilitators: 4 members of the Boundaryless team were engaged throughout all sessions.
- Cost: around EUR 1150 Euro or AUD $1750 (before discounts)
While there was some pre-reading in the form of links to the white papers and blog posts, the bootcamp content was primarily delivered in realtime in a consistent fashion, which consisted of:
- Slide presentation of around 30–45 minutes on a given topic, with a few questions.
- Breakout groups (4 people, 30 minutes) to complete a structured exercise using a particular canvas from the toolkit.
- Presentation back from a few of the groups, with additional discussion and questions.
This cycle repeated throughout each session, and only varied on day four with the inclusion of a guest speaker — Humbert Gimenez from Roche Diagnostics — who Simone interviewed on his experience in applying the PDT concepts.
The online whiteboard platform Miro was absolutely pivotal to the online delivery. I personally have been using Miro daily for at least the past year, and despite my high level of familiarity with the tool I must say I was impressed by how the Boundaryless team had designed the experience. Its hard to recall how online learning and collaboration at this scale was possible without tools like Miro! It performed very well throughout the four days, except for one blip whereby the platform was not responsive for about half an hour. Apparently the Boundaryless team had a backup plan, which did prompt me to think about how to make sure I build one in to my sessions, given how heavily I also rely on Miro for online facilitation.
One callout regarding the facilitation was the great vibe that the Boundaryless team managed to maintain during the whole bootcamp. They had a playlist of music, which they used to to introduce sessions and during breaks, and this became a playful focal point of discussion over the four days. One of my favourite moments was when we returned from a break and all the facilitators had virtual sunglasses on and were dancing to AC/DC — encouraging everyone to keep their energy up for the rest of the day. It may sound naff when described like this in writing, but it really created a vibe akin to a concert or in-person event, and I know first hand how hard it is to achieve this in an authentic way in an online, business environment.
Content
The bootcamp struck a good balance between describing each concept with the corresponding the theoretical underpinnings, while also keeping attention on the application of the toolkit through each of the canvases.
Seemingly as a result of trial and error from previous bootcamps, we didn’t follow the logical sequence from beginning to end, but rather started our learning journey in the middle of the process at strategy design, and then cycled back to the strategic awareness and exploration stages.
Another dimension which the bootcamp needed to balance was how to train participants as facilitators, and not only as users of the tools. Given how relatively nascent the PDT community of practitioners is, this proved to be an ambitious undertaking. Several people in the bootcamp were seemingly being exposed to the concepts and tools for the first time, and it presented a big leap for them to consider how to design a training workshop for a client organisation on how to apply PDT in their context. I anticipate that this dynamic will evolve over time, as I compare it to the more mature Strategyzer ecosystem and coach onboarding process, whereby only those who can demonstrate that they have already mastered the application of the tools are invited to be accredited at the next level.
Reflections
Needless to say, I loved the content and the learning experience. I have been a long time follower and user of the PDT, and I am also absorbed in the work of Strategyzer and Simon Wardley that are the key pillars that the PDT is built upon.
The PDT concepts are intellectually very dense, so the bootcamp is not something that I would recommend lightly to just anybody who is interested in innovation. To get the most out of it, I belive some immersion in the material prior to the bootcamp is necessary.
This isn’t my first rodeo as participant in online learning, having previously done the month long workshops for altMBA and Building A Second Brain. The PDT bootcamp was much more intense and condensed with realtime content delivery, as opposed to pre-recorded content and then coming together in person for collaboration and reflection. While I enjoyed the intensity of the bootcamp, it did feel like a bit of a rush to hear and absorb the content as well as practice applying it all at the same time. While I wouldn’t suggest that the bootcamp alter its format, it is interesting to contrast those experiences — each format has its advantages.
One things I love from global online learning experiences is the community and the relationships forged. With Boundaryless being based in Italy, and so many attendees from there, it played to a real soft spot for me given all the time I have spent there playing music. Its hard to find the words to precisely describe, but the PDT community has a bit of a “punk” vibe to it — these aren’t stuffy business school type people. Through the Zoom calls, I caught glimpses of people’s personalities — some expressed by piercings or tattoos, others with musical instruments close at hand. These are folks who are interested in making positive societal change through business, and who embrace complexity, ambiguity and humanity. And it is an energising feeling I am getting from the PDT community that excites me about the future of the platform economy, and inspires me to play a leading role in fostering it.
Interested in finding out more?
I would highly recommend the Boundaryless podcast as a accessible starting point. Simone and the Boundaryless team attract an incredible range and calibre of guests, and the conversations cover super interesting topics.
From there, the blog posts, white papers, toolkits (all open source) and training courses provide opportunities to go deeper.
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