Productization Blueprint

Productization Blueprint is used to implement product-specific technical components such as multi-tenancy, licensing, standard APIs, plugins, etc.

Why

The Productization Blueprint is an essential early starter for product development. There are certain technical components that are not required/important in bespoke applications, but are crucial for products. This is because products are quite different from bespoke applications. Read Products are Different topic to understand more.

How

A few technical factors should be considered to ensure product success.

Design for Tenancy

Multi-tenancy refers to designing product architecture where a single instance of a product serves multiple tenants (customers). Application servers, databases designed in such a manner are often shared.

• Security: How to isolate tenant data in a secure manner?
• Tenant Identification: Use subdomains? Separate Domains? Single Domain?
• User Account Management: Can a single user account be used to sign-in to multiple tenants?

Design for Branding

How can the product fulfil the need of different customers?

Design for Specific Extensions

How can the product deliver the specific needs of different customer organizations?

1. Through API
2. Through Plugins

Design for Payment Processing

How are payments processed?

1. Third-party Payment Gateway
2. PCI DSS Compliant Card Processing

Automatic Provisioning

Products should keep the cost of onboarding a new customer as low as possible. Design the product to automatically provision for a new customer and onboard them with minimal hand holding.

Design for Trials and Demos

How do trial/demo accounts operate? How is this integrated to your sales and marketing activities, and to the related systems such as your CRM?

Design for Releases

Use Feature Toggles/Canary Releases/Dark Launching to slowly roll out the change to a small subset of users/customers for verification.

Design for Licensing

What type of licensing model should you adopt?

1. Perpetual License
2. Subscription Based
3. Transaction Basis

Portfolio Strategy

How do you handle the modularity of your product offering?

1. Integrated Product (e.g.: Trello)
2. Product Suite (e.g.: Office 365)

References

• Canary Releases - Martin Fowler