Releasing the new Platform Opportunity Exploration Guide
Helping founders identify Platform Opportunities
Dear community,
after a fairly long field testing period started in 2018, we’re now releasing the first stable version of our Platform Opportunity Exploration Guide —the v 1.0.
If you’re a loyal member of our community you will recall that the Platform Opportunity Exploration guide was released in 2018 after an intense research process that brought us to integrate mainly three key pieces of work: Simon Wardley’s work on value chain mapping, the work of John Hagel and others at Deloitte Center for the Edge on digital markets, and Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory.
On that occasion we’ve been able to share with our community a unified market theory, that explained how platforms and aggregators acted on the value chain, what spaces and what elements they control and provided an initial playbook for understanding ecosystems and apply key transformations on the value chain.
This new release of the Platform Opportunity Exploration guide brings up truly notable changes:
- overtakes the existing Platform Opportunity Exploration Guide previously released in 2018 (v 0.1);
- is now based on more than two years of application of our opportunity exploration framework that has been largely taught at our Platform Design Bootcamp to hundreds of certified professionals.
- a newly packaged set of related canvases available in the companion download pack;
- now features both an “impromptu” (short) process of exploration and the fully structured one (suggested)
- introduces the Six Platform Plays approach to transforming value chains.
If you want to connect to the upcoming AMA session to discuss the Platform Opportunity Exploration guide in details, ask questions on how to use it and get help you can subscribe here: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/POE-2021-L so we can send you all the needed links!
Check out this Video Walkthrough of the new release:
From Ecosystems to Arenas to Platformization Spaces
In the guide you’ll also find new definitions that will help the platform explorer move through the opportunities in a large ecosystems first towards smaller “arenas”, and then up to the identification of the so-called “platformization space”. This process will help the designer prioritize, among the multiple and different interactions happening in the ecosystem, and filter out the multiple possibilities to create a new strategy, by identifying what part of the ecosystem one should be focusing on, step by step.
The process of identifying the opportunity, helps us move from large scale systems towards fine-grained multi-sided relationships that we can power and sustain thought platform experiences. The new process we present in the new guide is no more based on the platformization patterns we introduced in 2018 — they are still described in the guide but mainly for an “impromptu” process that can be used as a quick alternative to the more structured one — but instead is based on the Six Platform Plays that we introduced swiftly in an example we fully disclosed at the end of 2019 after our first Bootcamp in Milan.
A much leaner and solid process
The process we present in this release of the guide is rigorous and widely tested — we shared it with 150+ people we certified after the introduction of our Bootcamp format — and it’s capable to bring powerful insights, really helping designers understand their ecosystems before jumping into the Strategy design phase.
Contextually we are also releasing an update of our Platform Design Toolkit user guide, available since 2016: now the two documents fit more nicely together, are based on the same Platform Design Toolkit overall Canvas release (the 2.2) and also feature the same example across the two. Furthermore, the two download packs now feature a more consistent canvas distribution and logic structure that we describe below:
- The Platform Design Toolkit — Platform Opportunity Exploration Guide v 1.0 covers the Exploration Phase and features the Ecosystem Scan, The Wardley Map Canvas, the VRIO Canvas, the Patterns’ Library and the Brief Consolidation canvas;
- The Platform Design Toolkit — User Guide 2.2.1 is the reference for the Strategy Design Phase and features the Ecosystem Map Canvas, the Motivations Matrix, the Transactions Board, the Learning Engine Canvas, the Platform Experience Canvas, the MVP Canvas and the good old Platform Design Canvas.
- A guide for the validation phase is now in the works, at the moment the user should refer to our Design For Ecosystems: Discovering Potential and Testing Assumptions post that covers part of the process we use today to validate.
- A guide for hacking growth in the new growth landscape is also in the works — you can follow the research here The New Growth Landscape (it will be likely released during Q2 in draft)
Despite the basic strategy design process detailed in the Platform Platform Design Toolkit — User Guide still gives you a neat process to move from the identification of a multi-sided system to designing platform experiences that you can prototype, we truly believe that the new release of the Platform Opportunity Exploration guide will contribute to democratizing further advance platform thinking and bring tremendous value to the adopters that decide to dedicate more brainpower to understanding their ecosystem fully before jumping into the design phase.
Learning to master the process
For those of you that are interested in learning with Boundaryless how to master platform thinking based on what is probably the most used, most accessible and solid framework available so far worldwide:
- attend our Platform Design Bootcamp: the program, the next coming up in June, now extends on six four hours session that is accessible — with some effort — roughly around the world. We are now unlocking a cohort-based learning process (H2 2021) but the date in June is already available for you to book: join our almost 200 certified professionals worldwide…get a gist of the expereince from this attendee review;
- attend our Platform Design Sprint by bringing your own project work in April: the platform design sprint is a short but intense 10 hours course that will drive you through the Strategy Design process (that detailed in the User Guide) and also through the impromptu exploration process that has been introduced in this version of the Platform Opportunity Exploration guide. For this training format you can also apply as a Positive Shaper;
- Sign up to join our list of early adopters of our upcoming Growth Guide that will cover all things growth: from reaching liquidity to evolving the product side of your platform, from understanding growth loops and flywheels to mastering basic unit economics and more. Stay tuned for more release and webinars coming up;
Downloads
Don’t forget to update your library now and:
- Download the updated Platform Opportunity Exploration Guide here;
- Download the updated Platform Design Toolkit User Guide here;
Beware the copycats, choose the original, become part of a global community of tens of thousands that have been using Platform Design Toolkit to shape their dreams, business ideas, community projects and advanced policies for an interconnected world.
Meet us in a few weeks to ask questions and get answers
To help our adopters further we’re organizing a 2 hours interacting webinar session on April 28th at 4PM-6PM CEST where you’ll be able to participate live and ask questions, clarifications and share opinions on the newly released process and set of tools.
To receive an invitation and all the details to connect, please subscribe here: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/POE-2021-L
We’ve run the AMA session: replay it here!
Join 200+ certified practitioners and learn how to master Platform Opportunity exploration, Platform Strategy Design and more for you, your organization and your customers here:
Before You Go!
As you may know, everything we do is released in Creative Commons for you to use. In case you’re getting value out of these reads and tools, we encourage you to click the 👏button and hold down to 20–50 claps as this will help us to get more exposure, and hopefully, work more on developing these tools.
If you liked this post, you can also follow us on Twitter, we normally curate this kind of content.
Thanks for your support!
