Growing Fast While Failing Fast ain’t No Option: Challenges of Platform Product Management

Appway is a model-driven application development platform with a focus on work automation, used by 225 enterprises and 425K individuals worldwide. Over the last years, we released 5 versions and underwent an evolution from ad-hoc, customer-driven feature development into vision-driven roadmap planning and mature releases. Throughout this journey we faced 2 major challenges: 1. “Failing fast” is not an option: We must ensure backwards compatibility and ease of migration to enable our customers to grow and evolve with us, while introducing innovative features to attract new customers. 2. Our prior strengths of extensibility and openness turned into weaknesses. We had to evolve our platform into a controlled sandbox with clearly defined boundaries and openness at the periphery. This is technically challenging and requires change management within and outside the organization. In this talk, we outline how we addressed these challenges while keeping the pace and winning new customers.