The platforms team needs a chief. A great chief. A steward and protector, a guide and a field general. Every role on the team is important, but getting the right person steering the ship will differentiate whether the platforms team becomes an organizational gamechanger or just spends its time fixing things.
We’ve helped set this role up under several different names, and we’re not too picky about the title. That said, we’re very selective about the person. You need someone terrific steering the ship — someone who truly ‘gets it’.
There are two sides to the chief role. We call those sides the “Protector of the Realm” and the “Greatmaker”. Most of the time they are part of the same person’s role, but at a certain scale those two roles can also be held by a chief and a deputy.
Protector of the Realm
The bottom line for the “Protector of the Realm” side of the chief role is ensuring there is a healthy, two-way communication line between the organization’s priorities and the platform team’s capacity to execute. It is critical that the chief sits at the organization's leadership level in order to play this role.
Before the chief was part of the leadership team, the organization would set strategy and make critical planning decisions without a clear understanding of its own capacity to execute given its technology landscape. The leadership team probably already had representation from Programs, Development, Marketing/Communications, and Operations. But as far as technology was concerned, directives would come rolling down the hill fully formed and without warning, often scrambling best laid plans, pulling the rug out from under longer term investments in motion, and sometimes dictating near term project timelines that were impossible to meet with any level of quality.
With the chief on the leadership team, it’s a different story. While organizational leadership is setting strategy and plans, it has the benefit of someone there who understands exactly what the organization is capable of from a technology standpoint, and on what timeline. The product chief can also keep an ear to the ground across the organization to close important communication loops, prevent problems before they take root, and align cross-organizational strategy with cross-organizational execution.
Meanwhile, with the platforms chief in place at the leadership level, the platform team itself can do more effective and targeted work with the benefit of absolute clarity on the organization’s priorities and plans. They have the perspective needed to prioritize the most effective mix of longer term investments to strengthen the organization's technology foundation, together with more immediate or urgent projects.
Finally, leadership now includes the voice it needs to make clear the costs of neglecting key elements of its technology infrastructure, which otherwise only tends to happen once the levee breaks. The price of this awareness ends up being a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of cleaning up the mess later.
The Greatmaker
The other side of the chief role involves acting as “The Greatmaker” for the platform team’s work, meaning they are the person responsible for raising the level of the team’s game from merely good to outstanding. When it comes to the organization’s technology platforms, there will never be an end to the list of possible fixes, interventions, and ideas. So the entire ballgame comes down to a magical mix of the right set of prioritizations, the right people on the job, and the right mid-game adjustments.
It can be hard to pin down exactly where and when a skilled Greatmaker is raising the level of their team, but it’s always happening. You’ll see this person elevating good ideas from the team, helping act as a sounding board and thought partner for product managers, asking for the simplified, not-overly-technical reasoning behind a expert recommendation, helping tweak draft priority lists to more squarely hit their targets, and following instincts on when extra communication across departments is needed, to name just a few examples.
Perhaps most importantly, the Greatmaker is a skilled and collaborative leader of people, who recognizes and appreciates their talents and interests, and who helps draw great work from them by creating an atmosphere of trust, humility, and expert helpfulness. They align excitement with opportunity, finding just the right people to geek out on just what the organization needs figured out, just at the right time. There’s a willingness to get into the details, to slow down when appropriate, not rush to a decision when complications are relevant, to hear everyone out, and to make lean, targeted bets to help learn what’s needed to sharpen the plan.
Finally, the Greatmaker also isn’t simply satisfied with a slick build. This person knows that much more important for realizing the potential of the investment is the extent to which people (staff or external constituents) truly know how to take advantage of the platform. This requires an all-out ethos of communication and support that goes well beyond setting up a few trainings, but actually gets the product team on the playing field every day, working closely with their colleagues to deliver on the organization's mission.
Above all, the Greatmaker has excellent judgment. How? It’s hard to say, exactly. Greatmaking is a magical mix of skills that can’t easily be taught. But once you know what you're looking for you can recognize and nurture someone with the right raw materials.
So what’s the profile?
As with many of the hires we recommend, the profile for this role may differ from what many organizations might expect. You’re not looking for a traditional CTO or CIO. Extreme technical depth is not the key skillset here. Sure, you benefit from someone with enough technical proficiency to dive to just enough depth to understand the tradeoffs of one path versus another. And yes, they need to be a systems thinker of the highest caliber.
But the key skillsets here are leadership, communication, and diplomacy, mixed with that special magic that allows someone to elevate a team to greatness. The right person may already be in your organization, in a different role, with their full potential waiting to be unleashed. Sometimes the right person can be elevated from one of the Product Manager roles — regardless of whether they have depth in each of the team's specific technologies — especially when they have already shown they excel at the types of skills and instincts required.
And when this person is hired externally, they need to be nothing short of fantastic. You as an organization need to be clear-eyed about who you are recruiting and what you are screening for, to be willing both to wait for the right person, and then to really set them up to succeed.
You don’t need the fancy tech genius, the IT whiz, or the ace developer. Those are all probably the wrong fit. You want the person who will both be right at home in your leadership team as "Protector of the Realm" of your technology, and who has the mix of "Greatmaker" qualities needed to raise your entire platform team of can-do problem-solvers and make-betterers — and with them your entire organization — to an entirely new level.