Turning a Product Into a Platform

I'm a massive fan of building not just a product, but a platform - not only solving a specific product for a user, but building a foundation to allow others to solve their own problems using your system. To do so, I think there are three essential components needed: well-defined constructs, open integration surfaces and community. Well-defined constructs If you want your platform to be something people can talk about and build upon, you need to have easy to understand building blocks that are at the core of the platform, with consistent names and behaviours, and documentation that establishes what these constructs are. Let’s make this more concrete - for the Examplary platform, these are things like Organisations, Tests, Practice Spaces, Source Materials. Being able to reason about how these basic entities interact with each other, makes it easier for community members to realise how to use the platform and to suggest features, and for developers to think about what an integration…