Software Platform and Product ( Wholesale & Retail Market)

Agile coaching for the Software Platform team?

We were debating Coaching for Product teams and Platform teams, are these?same?or does something require to change while doing team coaching?

We want to help our platform team’s product owner, what coaching strategy variation is essential?

Let us look at the characteristic.

Products are the technology-enabled offerings adopted by customers and employees.

Just to understand the business model a bit separately

What is the Difference Between Wholesale and Retail Business Models?

The word wholesale commonly means selling in bulk quantities and retail stands for selling merchandise in limited volumes.

Wholesale and retail are two distribution arrangements that create a significant part of the supply chain. When the goods are manufactured, they are sold in large quantities (wholesale) to the wholesalers who further sell them to the retailers who permanently sell them to the absolute clients.

While a wholesaler sells goods to?the?businesses,?as?they purchase goods to sell it further. On the other hand, a retailer targets the final consumer and sells goods to them.

Can we apply the same strategy for both these teams?

WHOLESALE

Wholesale is a business in which goods are sold in enormous volumes to retailers, industries, and other businesses.

Wholesalers do not pay much attention to the location of the shop and its appearance and display of goods because they sell particularly a unique type of items, and their customers are normally retailers or other businesses who purchase the goods for the purpose of resale. These things do not matter to them at all.

In wholesale business, the wholesaler offers higher significance on the number of goods, not on the quality.

The customers of a wholesale business are extended in diverse cities, towns, or even in various states. Most goods are sold on credit to the customers of the wholesale business. The price of purchase on wholesale is lower as it consists of fewer profit margins.

RETAIL

When the goods are sold to the ultimate consumer in limited lots, then this type of business is called retail.

Retail means selling goods in modest parts. When the goods are sold to the final customer, for consumption and not for the purpose of resale, in minuscule volumes

Retailers are the middleman between wholesalers and customers. They purchase goods from wholesalers in volume and sell them to the ultimate consumer in small lots.

The prices of goods purchased in retail are comparatively high. The first and foremost reason behind this is the advertisement cost, and the profit margin is high. Moreover, they include other expenses in the price of goods on a proportionate basis, like the rent of premises, salary to the workers, electricity expenses, etc.

Let us consider same context for Product(Retail market) and Platform(Wholesale Market).

A product is a functional or valuable portion of a program, while a platform is a system that facilitates a product to perform or interact with another product.

Products produce a single revenue stream, while platforms, which we single out as mediators that link two or more separate customer groups and grant direct communication between them, can provoke several revenue streams.

Product teams concentrate on delivering the needs of end-users in ways that bring about revenue, boost yield, or otherwise straight establish value for a company. They operate like miniature businesses, responsible for go-to-market planning, user experience, and adoption, in extension to technology delivery.

Platform teams concentrate on establishing an organization’s core systems available, reusable, and modern, so that they effectively facilitate products.

Platforms serve to scale down engineering friction, which, in turn, provides rapid value delivery to end-users. Efficient platform architectures happen at the junction of engineering, industry, and people, harmonizing each one’s goals in the function of promoting accelerated value delivery to consumers.

Platforms serve with the distribution of applications, which can be “Tech tool stack Architecture”, aiding the implementation of outstanding practices in an enterprise within program and cost constraints.

Facebook is a marvelous example of a platform AND a software product

For an Agile coach to coach all these teams, platform teams, infrastructure teams, service teams, and products are distinct. Their team visions, team strategy, team KPI, etc are different, need to treat differently.

We will not able to use the same lens when we have stakeholders’ coaching strategies crafted out for these teams to enhance their ways of working.

McKinsey forecasts that 30% of all global economic activity ($60 trillion) could be mediated by platforms within new digital ecosystems by 2025.

In The platform world

In The platform world

• It is a long term thinking
• It is not a consumer world, but both producers, consumers, developers, everyone's world need to think about
• It is more related to architectural capabilities ( Build an end to end system)
• Product comes first, them product stabilization in the market?and?next Platform. So the platform has a history
• Product ( External facing) to the platform ( Internal capability facing )
• Resolve complex problems by using the platform capabilities( What are those)
• Ecosystem orchestrating through a platform
• Converging wholesale market and retail market!

I am sure you have already experienced the same as what I am experiencing.