Too Little; Too Late: Effective Developer Support Structures in Digital Platforms

Digital platforms are software-based products on which independent developers build add-on applications or "apps". Given the high risk, high reward nature of establishing platforms and their costly failures, platform owners make huge investments into support structures, such as technical documentation, helpdesks or on-site training, to enable developers to build add-ons. The effectiveness of these developer support structures in enabling developers is, despite its ramifications for long-term platform success, unexplained. By analyzing the results of a field study among 38 developer firms across five platforms both in-depth and across cases we show that architectural variations of platforms explain the effectiveness of developer support structures. Thereby, this study yields important contributions to research on digital platforms, developer support structures, and the broader array of research on product development. Our results provide platform owners with a tool for making more effective investments int...