Lessons from a career in platform product management - Teresa Huang (Head of Product, Bupa)
In this episode of The Product Experience, host Randy Silver talks with Teresa Wang, Head of Product for Enablement at Bupa, about the unique challenges of platform product management.
If you've ever worked on internal tools or managed products that don't directly impact the company's bottom line, you know the challenge. Teresa shares hard-won insights on how to measure platform impact in business terms, move beyond "efficiency" as your only metric, and build the right narrative to secure ongoing investment.
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Key Takeaways
Efficiency is no longer enough as a core metric. Businesses want to know "so what?"—platform teams must connect their work to business outcomes like retention, acquisition, and NPS, not just developer productivity.
Use the "hop two steps" approach. Platform PMs must understand the immediate user (developers) AND the end-customer impact. Work with both the platform team and experience teams to drive joint business outcomes.
Build business cases proactively, don't wait to be asked. Rather than responding to API requests, identify where platform capabilities can unlock multiple use cases and present those opportunities to experience teams.
Create joint OKRs with experience teams. Tie your performance to shared goals with the teams you're enabling. This creates stronger alignment and shared accountability for outcomes.
Make the invisible visible through role-play demos. Rather than showing code in showcases, have teams role-play customer scenarios—showing the time it takes today versus tomorrow with your new service. This keeps stakeholders engaged.
Master the 3-minute rule. When meeting with non-technical stakeholders, they must understand your value proposition within 3 minutes. Practice this pitch relentlessly with your team.
Track three types of health metrics: (1) Usage/adoption—how many systems are calling your service; (2) Platform health—reliability, error reduction, monitoring; (3) Ecosystem health—growth across business units and governance.
Set retirement thresholds for low-use services. Establish a baseline (e.g., usage per month) below which a service isn't worth maintaining. Redirect those users to other services or consolidate capabilities.
Emphasise "value unlocked" not "features deployed". Milestones should describe what you've enabled for the business, not just what technical work was completed. Track back to business metrics like NPS uplift or reduced service time.
Platform PM doesn't require deep technical expertise. The fundamentals remain the same: find the end user, understand their problems and goals, and work with your engineers. Success requires curiosity, empathy, and leadership without direct reports.
About the author
The Product Experience
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