Overview
The PDT v2.2 — Exploration, Design, Growth. The comprehensive, battle-tested toolkit the modern pipelines are built from.
The Platform Design Toolkit (PDT) is Boundaryless's flagship strategic toolkit for platform and ecosystem design. Over a decade of iterations and field use, it grew into a comprehensive framework organized in three complementary blocks, each with its own user guide.
This is the canonical, full-length narrative of the PDT — the proven source the modern pipelines are composed from. The pipelines re-package these same techniques and canvases for flexible navigation; this guide remains the authoritative place for the complete reasoning and worked examples.
The three blocks
Exploration
Opportunity exploration: scan the arena, map the ecosystem, assess capabilities, consolidate the strategic brief. 5 canvases. (Guide v1.1, 2022)
Design
Strategy design: map entities, motivations, transactions, flywheels, platform experience, MVP. 8 canvases. (Guide v2.2.1, 2021)
Growth
Growth and product: liquidity, network effects, transactions, growth tactics. 5 canvases + cards. (Guide v1.0, 2022)
How the blocks fit together
The flow was designed as a coherent end-to-end journey:
Each block was documented in a dedicated user guide (a substantial PDF of 50–100 pages). All three guides share a common conceptual foundation: the ecosystem-first mindset, the entity-role framework, and the platform-as-infrastructure paradigm.
Where these blocks also live as pipelines
The same PDT material is also available in composable form. If you'd rather navigate it as pipelines, the blocks correspond as follows:
| PDT block | Also available as |
|---|---|
| Exploration | Understanding Ecosystems |
| Design | Designing Platform Experience |
| Growth | Go-to-market & Liquidity + Achieving Growth |
The correspondence is intentionally not strict one-to-one: some techniques have been recomposed into pipelines that cross the original block boundaries. The PDT guide here remains the authoritative long-form reference for all of them.
Credits
The PDT was developed over many years by the Boundaryless team, with contributions from practitioners across industries. It is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Reading guide
- Start with the block most relevant to your current question
- Use the canvas links to jump to the Canvas Library for compilation details
- Each block's landing page introduces the narrative from the original user guide