Past Writings / Essential Readings

Over the last two decades, I’ve published hundreds of essays exploring platform design, organizational architecture, and — more recently — how AI reshapes both. This page collects the pieces that, I believe, still matter: some introduced a framework, or changed how I think, and keep generating conversations years later. Some of them I wrote with colleagues and friends along the way.

They’re organized by theme, not by date. Start wherever pulls you in.

1. Platform Design Foundations

What platforms are, how they work, and how to design them.

The 7 Key Principles of Platform Design — The most-read piece I’ve ever published. A distillation of years of work into seven design principles that still hold.
12 Patterns of Platform Design to Kickstart Innovation Strategies — A pattern library for platform thinking: from enabling transactions to orchestrating ecosystems.
Exploring Ecosystems: The Patterns of Platformization — How industries become ecosystems, and the recurring patterns behind that shift.
Understanding Platforms through Value Chain Maps — Combining Wardley Mapping with platform design to see where value migrates.
Key Concepts of Platform Design — A reference entry point to the foundational vocabulary.

Here, four more technical articles that describe the latest implementation of four key approaches to solving the macro-problems in platform design:

2. The Platform Organization

How platform thinking reshapes organizational structure — from functional hierarchies to modular, entrepreneurial architectures.

An Entrepreneurial, Ecosystem-Enabling Organization — The root of the 3EO model: how organizations become platforms for entrepreneurship, not just execution.
How Organizational Structures Evolve: From Functional to Matrix to Platform Models — The structural evolution from functional to matrix to platform, and why each transition happens.
How to Structure Units and Teams in a Platform Organization — The practical architecture: how teams, units, and capabilities are wired together.
Four Archetypes of Platform Organizations — Not all platform orgs are the same. Four distinct patterns of how organizations adopt platform logic internally.
The Platform Organization Manifesto four beliefs and eleven principles
Key Architectural Decisions in Platform Orgs — The structural choices that shape how authority, accountability, and autonomy flow.
A Common Language for the Platform Organization — Why shared language is a key infrastructure.
From Bureaucracy to Market: How Chargebacks Can Transform Your Organization — An underappreciated mechanism for introducing market logic inside organizations.
On Modular Technology in Platforms, Organizations — The entanglement of technology infrastructure with organizational design and platform economics.
The Trilemma of Organizational Unbundling — You can’t have full autonomy, full alignment, and full efficiency at once. The trade-offs are real.
Playing to Win in Platform Organizations — How strategy frameworks apply (and break) inside platform-structured organizations.

3. Portfolio Strategy & Product Architecture

How organizations manage portfolios of products, services, and value propositions — and why this is the hardest design problem most companies ignore

Value Propositions in Business Ecosystems: Products, Marketplaces, Extensions — The typology of value propositions available to ecosystem players.
Product Bundling & Multi-Product Portfolios — How bundling decisions shape platform economics and portfolio coherence.
How to Create a Product Taxonomy in Portfolios — The structural logic underneath a well-organized product portfolio.

Portfolio Map Canvas — The tool I designed for visualizing product portfolio strategy. One of the most-used frameworks from Boundaryless.
From Product to Context: Expanding the Portfolio Map with Ecosystem Scanning — Moving beyond product-centric portfolios toward contextual, ecosystem-aware strategy.

4. Ecosystems, Markets & Composability

The bigger picture: how markets are becoming modular, how ecosystems compete, and what composability means for strategy.

Defining the Ecosystem Domain: Ecosystems, Arenas, and Jobs to Be Done — A framework for scoping the ecosystem you’re actually operating in.
Challenges of Ecosystem-Centric Mapping — The hard problems of mapping ecosystems: boundaries, dynamics, and the limits of our tools.
Towards Modular and Composable Markets — Why markets are decomposing into modular, recombinant pieces — and what that means for how we organize.
DAOs and Orgs: Composability — What decentralized autonomous organizations reveal about composability as an organizational principle.

5. AI, Coordination & the Future of Organizations

The frontier: what happens when AI doesn’t just automate tasks but restructures how coordination works.

How AI Transforms the Logic of Value Creation in Markets and Organizations — The piece that reframes AI not as an efficiency tool but as a shift in the logic of value creation itself.
Generative AI and the Platform Organization — How generative AI changes the economics of platform organizations specifically.
The Platform Is What You Can Automate: Organizations for the AI Agent Economy — When agents do the coordination, what’s left for organizational design? The structure-superstructure distinction.
Agents & Competition — How autonomous agents reshape competitive dynamics in markets and ecosystems.
From Owning the App to Owning the Grammar: The Evolution of Vertical SaaS Platforms — The shift from application ownership to ontological ownership — a key thesis in the age of AI.

6. Visions on The Theory of Organizing

The big-picture pieces where the intellectual threads converge into a theory of how organizing itself is changing.

A New Cosmology of Organizing — Platforms as cosmo-techno-organizing. Why technology is not anthropologically universal but enabled by particular cosmologies — and what that means for how we design organizations.
Ecosystemic Evolutions — A post-Drucker Forum reflection on what ecosystemic organizing actually means as markets, networks, and organizational forms co-evolve in real time.
Converging towards a Common Protocol of Organizing — The hypothesis that a common model of organizing — small units, shared services, dynamic contracting — is now emerging across industries and can be supported by software.
A Viable Path to Regenerative Organization Development — Regeneration as organizational strategy — not greenwashing but structural redesign.
Challenges That Outgrow Single Institutions — Why the hardest problems today demand coordination across organizations, not within them.