Scaling the Organization of a Platform Product

Since 2003 the Appway Platform was built with a small team of highly talented software engineers working with zero overhead. After 10 years successfully being a big fish in a small pond, the founders decided that Appway was ready to tackle the big pond of Business Software. Thus the need to build a full-fledged product organization while continuing to release the Appway Platform, which by then was used by 100+ financial institutions and 175,000+ users. Now, 3 years down the road, we have a new organization and have shown that it scales, without losing any key engineers. In the meantime, we have released 4 new versions of the Platform and 2 new products, extended our customer base to 165 institutions and 420,000 individuals worldwide, and improved the whole product experience. In the talk I will share what SCRUM didn’t solve, why we separated the PO and PM roles and why engineers are not necessarily PMs. I will also explain the new product organization and three key ingredients for success: focus, ownership and role models.