Chapter 5 – Platform Architecture

This chapter provides a foundation for understanding platform architectures. It begins by explaining how complexity stymies innovation and leads to an unrealistic optimism bias in platform ecosystems. It then describes how a platform’s architecture can make growing complexity manageable by serving two functions, partitioning innovation tasks and facilitating reintegration of an ecosystem’s parts. We explain the connections between a platform’s architecture and the “microarchitecture” of its apps. We then describe properties of good architecture: simplicity, resilience, maintainability, and evolvability. We also explain the two mechanisms for modularizing architectures along with practical guidelines for implementing them. Finally, we explain how platform governance influences the degree to which the potential advantages of thoughtful platform architecture are realized in practice.