As Richard P. Rumelt puts it in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, “the core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation, and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with these factors.” The Platform Business Strategy Canvas is the perfect tool to coordinate and focus actions on the critical factors in the strategy for a platform business (e.g. marketplace).

You can use the Platform Business Strategy Canvas on its own or as the companion to The Platform Business Strategy: a Practical Guide for Busy Product Leaders, my book on product strategy for platform businesses (available from Amazon). In the first chapters of the book, we discover the critical factors in a platform business:
- the core job,
- the network effects,
- ways to overcome the chicken and egg problem, and
- the fundamental product risks (value, usability, feasibility).
The Platform Business Strategy Canvas helps you put them together and play them against each other to craft a successful strategy.
You can also use the Platform Business Strategy Canvas on Miro – particularly useful for remote/distributed teams. Just open the template on Miroverse and enjoy!
Get the book
Platform Business Strategy: a Practical Guide for Busy Product Leaders is available on Amazon (eBook).
Sign up for a workshop
I run a workshop on product strategy for platform businesses. It follows the same structure of the book and is highly interactive and hands-on. I’ve done it as part of world-class product management events, like Productized and JAM, with an NPS of 57.
Get in touch if you’d like to:
- know about upcoming editions of the workshop;
- discuss the possibility of running a workshop for you and your team.