The Art Of Building Platforms

Platforms are ecosystems. They enable developers to build new experiences that activate a value exchange between businesses and people. With more of these experiences, the richer the ecosystem and the more successful the platform becomes. A platform can be as small as two or three apps working together to create an enhanced consumer experience such as bots in Messenger — or as large as hundreds of thousands of apps connected to a set of shared tools and services. Regardless of size, platforms are subject to a similar push and pull of aligned incentives and ROI. They are built to allow multiple groups to create and sustain long-term relationships and jointly serve people together. Even simple decisions, such as how open or closed they should be, can have substantial downstream impacts, many of which can't be easily anticipated. Yet the benefits of platform technologies often outweigh the risks, and today we’re seeing significant growth in collaboration and platform-minded thinking as a result.

A decade ago Facebook launched its platform. At the time, Facebook had 20 million people and was the sixth-most-visited site on the Internet. There were many features and experiences that we could not build on our own, so creating a platform opened up parts of the experience to enable developers to build software for people on Facebook. On May 24, 2007, Facebook hosted 750 people at the kick-off of its new Platform. Within just a few months, tens of thousands of applications launched and hundreds of thousands of developers were connecting people to new experiences.

Over the years at Facebook, my team and I have learned a lot about building platforms. Below are some of the key lessons we've learned about how to build a sustainable platform that creates value, both for our partners and our community.

Focus On Learning, Not Launch

Platforms typically launch with a moment in time. While a good launch can put you on a path to long-term success, it often is not sufficient to ensure sustainable, long-term success.

• Start with a small number of partners.  Ask them how they measure success and how they would design the APIs to work with their products.
• Forge deep partnerships that yield insight and feedback along the way. If your platform is not immediately successful, starting small helps contain the number of partners affected by changes you make, iterate along the way, and gives you a chance to get the kinks out at the start.
• Remember your partners are the gatekeepers. Without adoption even the best idea will not positively impact people.
• Conduct litmus tests. In product review meetings I ask those who are working directly with third-party developers about the reception they're hearing. If they are having a hard time getting developers they speak with on board, we don't have a product-market fit. So even if it seems like a good idea, the product will never be successful without developers willing to adopt.

Define Success Upfront — Equitable Value Exchange

One of the biggest challenges with platforms is setting up aligned incentives. Imagine what you want the platform to be in six months, two years, and then five years. Then reframe the question from the perspective of the developer or business. And then again in the eyes of the people using the products built on the platform. How do each of these stakeholders define success? Finding the happy balance of what people, partners, and the platform give and receive is critical to the long-term success of any new platform.

The Goldilocks Rule

Every platform starts with a wish list of ambitious partners. These are the partners who will give the platform legitimacy and lend a sense that it is worth investing in. Even if they are excited about the opportunity, sometimes their ability to execute quickly is a limiting factor. They will also likely request more from version one than you would want to build out of the gate.

On the other end are startups and small companies willing to do whatever it takes to get onto the next platform. They are willing to pivot resources and invest to ensure a place at launch. But often they have the least to lose, and their feedback is not representative of broader needs nor scalable as you define your product.

This is where “Goldilocks partners” come in. In between the large and small developers are the right partners. Just the right size to launch with, but not so big as to slow you down, and not so small as to be betting their company on access to your platform. Goldilocks partners bring enough of a name to be recognizable, are nimble enough to ship quickly, and are savvy enough to provide the alpha feedback needed to ensure a great launch.

A Platform Is Not Just A Product

Success on a platform is not made up of APIs and a consumer experience.  When we asked developers what they value in a platform beyond growth, they told us:

• Documentation
• Support
• Stability
• Bug fixing

In the early years of Facebook's platform, we underinvested in these areas we focused on growth and new features. Over time, we heard the feedback that developer experience was critical to platform success, and we ramped up our focus on these areas. Eventually, because it was so important to developers, our CEO made a public commitment at our F8 2014 conference around stability and bug fixing. Any team putting out public APIs and other developer products that are not launched as beta are bound by these commitments including a 90% bug fix SLA within 30 days.

You do not build a product in a vacuum. We build platforms with highly cross-functional teams that include people from partnerships, policy, support, engineering, product marketing, analytics, design, research, and many other groups. Businesses are banking their success on a long-term partnership, so community and developer support are signs that a platform is invested in their long-term success. There are many interlocking teams that work in concert to make a platform grow and thrive. For example, an overly restrictive policy about who can leverage a platform might discourage investment whereas an overly permissive one could invite abuse. Knowing how you will manage both through policy, integrity, and partnerships is key.

Connecting Businesses And People

Platforms are delicate ecosystems that require care to build and maintain, but they are also sustainable ways of creating scaled products for people. Unlike consumer products, unnecessary churn in platforms causes businesses to become wary. Many businesses are betting substantial resources on the platform, and they are making hiring plans and resource allocations based on the promises you set. Platforms likewise should not surprise people.

As a technology company, we're defined by our mission to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. We always strive to help developers build engaging, useful experiences and services that make people's lives better. There's an opportunity to connect a lot more people through the experiences that developers are building, and we couldn’t accomplish any of this without the help of all the developers and other partners in our community; together we will connect the world.