Platforms have been getting a lot of attention over the last couple of years including breathtaking market evaluations. Areas that are obviously special in comparison to “normal” software products are the importance of the ecosystem and the difficulty of defining the term “customer”, in particular for multi-sided platforms. Can we still consider and manage them as software products, or are they fundamentally different and require a different management approach?

Hans-Bernd Kittlaus is the chairman of ISPMA e.V. He is also the owner and general manager of InnoTivum Consulting (www.innotivum.com) which he founded in 2001. Before, he was Director of SIZ GmbH (Computing Center of the German Savings Banks Organization, Germany) and Head of Software Product Management and Development units of IBM. His main focus area is software product management. Hans-Bernd has been working as a trainer, coach and consultant for both corporate IT organizations and companies in a number of industries. He has trained hundreds of product managers in more than 70 SPM trainings including all five ISPMA-based training modules. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and has published numerous books and articles, his latest being “Software Product Management: The ISPMA-Compliant Study Guide and Handbook” (with Samuel Fricker, Springer 2017). He is Diplom-Informatiker (corresponds to M.S. in Computer Science) and certified as ISPMA Certified Software Product Manager, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), and PRINCE2 Practitioner.