Shipping on Someone Else’s Roadmap: Lessons from Platform Ecosystems

Special thanks to Productside for hosting!

What happens when some of your biggest product challenges come from a platform you don't control?

This month, Katie Campbell shares hard-won lessons from building products across the Salesforce ecosystem—where adoption, customer experience, and even product strategy were often shaped by the platform underneath the product.

We'll explore both sides of platform dependency: external products shipped into marketplaces and ecosystems like Salesforce, and internal teams building automation, workflows, and tooling on top of enterprise platforms.

Through real examples, Katie will dig into questions many product teams eventually face: How do you build around platform constraints? What happens when the platform creates customer friction you can't fix? And how do you make product decisions when someone else's roadmap can change yours?

You'll walk away with:

• A framework for thinking about platform dependency as a product decision, not just a technical one
• Real-world examples of how platform constraints can affect adoption and customer experience
• Lessons for balancing what customers need with what the underlying platform makes possible
• Practical approaches for managing roadmap decisions when a critical dependency is outside your control

This session is for you if:

• You're building a product on Salesforce or another enterprise platform
• Your roadmap depends on APIs, integrations, marketplaces, cloud services, or AI models
• You've inherited platform limitations that your customers don't care aren't "your fault"
• You've ever had to explain why something seemingly simple isn't simple because of what's underneath it

Agenda:
6:00 - 6:30: Networking
6:30 - 7:30: Talk
7.30 - 8:00: Networking