Product Architecture

What is Product Architecture?

Your product architecture serves as the blueprint of your product’s functional elements. It demonstrates how the jigsaw pieces that make up your product interact and work together. Think of it as an organized map that chunks up the key aspects of your product, breaking it down to let you see how it all fits. Whatever type of product you’re designing, your architecture is the foundational structure that will guide you. 

Your product architecture is a strategy that links what your product does to how it’s built. It’s not concerned about the physical product itself, but instead the functions and features of it, stripping it all down into manageable pieces. By working on your product architecture, you can spot redundancies, streamline processes, and focus on what really matters. 

Let’s use a real-life example to make this clear. Say your product is a smartphone. Your product architecture details the components that make it, such as the hardware like cameras and batteries, and the software like the apps and operating system. As well as this, your product architecture will illuminate how these different components or ‘chunks’ interact with each other and what’s dependent on others. Changing your operating system won’t affect your camera, but it might require a new CPU to run it. Having this architecture blueprint guides you when you launch products or make improvements.

Why is product architecture important?

Your product architecture is more than just a diagram showcasing how things come together. It’s the backbone of your product, dictating how it’s designed. Get it right, and you’ll guarantee a smooth development and fewer headaches down the road.

To understand why product architecture is important, it’s best to think about building a product like building a house. Your architecture is going to dictate what features you can include, and what you’ll be able to build on these foundations in the future. So the product architecture you put in place at the beginning will dictate how your product grows. You need to think about what you want your ‘house’ to be like in the future so that you can easily add these new developments. If you’re looking to remodel after a few years, you’re going to be bound by the limitations of the original foundations and architecture.

Want to move your kitchen? You might struggle if your plumbing isn’t right. Need to add another room? You may need to knock a wall down to make it fit properly. It’s unlikely that you’re going to be changing your product architecture – it’s a big task and expensive – so when you go to craft it, you need to consider all the different things that are going to influence how you design your product. Make sure you do your product discovery and customer research before working on your product architecture.  

This explains why it’s important to get your product architecture right, but what makes it a beneficial process? Why do you need to map out your product architecture? Here are a few benefits of having a clear product architecture.

Clarity and focus

The process of mapping out your product architecture encourages you to dig beneath the surface, helping you think more deeply about your product. It enables you to spot unnecessary overlaps, such as if two features doing the same job. The clarity you get from having your product architecture down on paper ensures that you’re optimizing how everything works together, not just how it looks.

Improved user experience

Building out your product architecture helps you plan a product where the user comes first. Your product architecture directly informs how users will interact with your product, as you’re mapping out the flows and journey they’re going to take to move from feature to feature. This means that you’ll be following a very customer-centric approach when developing these foundations.

Without good architecture in place, new features could disrupt the user flow, leading to a clunky experience. In other words, product architecture is your blueprint for creating seamless, frustration-free interactions.

Better alignment between teams

When you’ve got a clear map laid out, everyone in your product team structure – from designers to engineers – knows the playbook. The result? Better communication, fewer misunderstandings, and faster development. Your product architecture is the waypoint that keeps everyone marching toward the same goal.

Speed and efficiency

Strong product architecture speeds up your development process. With a clear rulebook in place that dictates what can be done to a product, teams can move faster, communicate better, and ultimately ship your product (or that next killer feature) much quicker. It also slashes development costs since everyone knows exactly how the pieces fit.

Consistent quality and reliability

By establishing strong architecture, you not only build a reliable product but also make maintenance a lot easier to deal with. Found some bugs? They’re going to be a lot simpler to find and fix. Have some complex issues? When isolated, they don’t impact the whole system. The result? Higher quality and happier customers.

Flexibility and scalability

Need to add a feature based on customer feedback? No sweat. A solid product architecture makes it easy to plug new elements into your system without breaking the whole thing. Whether you’re expanding or adapting to market changes, this flexibility keeps your product nimble and future-proof.

Getting customer feedback is a great way to innovate your product. Learn how to train your support teams to give great customer feedback below ↘️: 

What are the different types of Product Architecture? 

There are two main types of product architecture:

1. Modular Architecture
2. Integral Architecture 

These two methods are opposite ends of the spectrum, giving you options on how you can slice up and organize your product’s core components. They each have their own perks and quirks. 

Modular architecture – Mix-and-match

When using modular product architecture, each component of your product is a self-contained, well-defined module that does its own thing. It’s kind of like crafting a product with building blocks. If you want to change and upgrade one specific feature, you can swap out that specific block without disrupting the rest of the product. 

This approach gives you great flexibility as you improve and augment your product. It’s designed to allow for scalability, as to add more features, you just tack on more modules/blocks to your product. It’s also great from a maintenance perspective, as any faulty features can be fixed without needing to change the others. It’s also easier to feature flag and turn them on and off. 

In other words, a modular approach keeps all the features of your product in their own box.

Of course, the modular approach to product architecture isn’t perfect. You need to be cautious that the modules you’re adding all work nicely with each other. This approach can also be pretty costly, and managing multiple modules can start to stack up and become a headache to organize, especially if you have a product with loads of features. 

Integral architecture – All-in-one design

Integral architecture is where every piece of your product is tightly knit and interconnected. Do something on one feature and it will have a snowball effect on others. It’s like a jigsaw, you need every piece to complete the puzzle, and each part is critical to the entire outcome of your product. 

Integral architecture is designed for when you have efficiency and high performance as a main goal. Everything is built to work in tandem together, meaning that you can optimize the heck out of it. This approach is ideal for complex products. 

Of course, having your product components and features so closely connected and dependent on each other has its downsides. Flexibility takes a massive hit, as you may have to redesign the whole system if you want to upgrade and iterate. Plus maintenance can become more of an issue, as fixing one thing may require you to make changes elsewhere. Still, when done right, integral product architecture can help you deliver a superior performance. 

Which product architecture is better? 

It really depends on your product. If you’re looking for something flexible, scalable, and easy to tweak – go modular. If high performance, cost efficiency, and tight integration are your top priorities – integral is your best bet. Either way, both types help you build smarter products. Just pick your flavor!

How do you build your product architecture? 

So how do you get started with building product architecture? Well, there’s actually a good four-step process you can follow to make sure you design your architecture with solid foundations and ensure that you’ve considered everything. Here are the main steps to follow to do it well. 

1. Create the schematic

To help you quickly get a better understanding of how your product fits together, you’ll want to start by drawing a schematic. This is a diagram that identifies the parts of the product and how they link up. Here you want to highlight your core features and components. 

There are many tools you can use to do this, but whatever you use – even if it’s just pen and paper – you want to focus on clearly organizing what your product is and does. Map out everything so that nothing gets lost in the shuffle. Take a look at our example schematic above to give you some inspiration. 

2. Group the features

Now that you have your schematic, you want to start grouping your features together. You want to go beyond grouping them by function and instead think about how each element interacts. If two features are reliant on each other, group them together. 

This step is crucial in showcasing the connections in your product, whilst also highlighting any redundancies hiding in your design. 

3. Map out the structure

Here’s where things get a bit more detailed. In this step, you want to lay out your groups in a logical, visual format where you can illustrate the flow of your product. Where your features sit in relation to each other, and how it’s all structured together. It’s kind of like the skeleton of your product. Focus on having a clear pathway between your elements. This step is great for helping you see the user experience and the journey from one feature to another. It’s a bit like user story mapping.

4. Draw connections

Spotted two features that relate to each other in some way? Does one feature need the data from another to work? If so, you need to draw these connections, mapping out these dependencies, flows, and potential bottlenecks. 

Do more than just say that two components are connected: define how. Links can be structural –  they fit together to build your product – or they can be behavioral –  showing that they are influenced by each other. 

Without drawing these connections, you’ve just got a bunch of isolated pieces, not a coherent system. 

Who is responsible for product architecture? 

Fittingly, the individual who governs product architecture is the Product Architect. Ideally, this would be a defined role but it can also fall onto the shoulders of the Chief Technical Officer or Senior Engineers. Product architecture is super technical so it’s unlikely that it will sit with product-specific roles like Product Manager unless you’re a technical PM.

Instead, a PM will be working on other tasks, and many of these can support the creation of your product architecture. Check out the full list of Product Management tasks below: 

As a Product Manager, there are a few things you can do to support your Product Architect – if it’s not already you. Setting the product vision and defining product requirements will ensure that your team can build a well-aligned product architecture.

The core aim of a product architect isn’t to build product architecture that just looks good on paper, but to create something that works in real life. They need to juggle user needs, market requirements, and technical feasibility to make sure everything is structurally sound. 

A Product Architect will have input from designers and engineers to make sure what they’re building is efficient, viable, and scalable. So while the product architect is the main person responsible for product architecture, it is still a team effort.

What to consider when creating your product architecture 

Just like the foundations of a house, if you don’t get your product architecture right from the start, it can limit what you’re able to build onto it. In worst-case scenarios, your product could come tumbling down. 

There’s a lot riding on your product architecture. It’s certainly not something that you should rush through. Here are some things to think about to make sure you nail it. 

Define product requirements

Before you dive into your product architecture, you want to make sure that what you create is heavily influenced by your product requirements. Be certain that you know your customer needs through research, have an understanding of your market requirements, and stay focused on  your product strategy and vision. 

This clarity ensures that you are building an architecture that allows you to create a product that aligns with customer expectations. 

Think about the entire product life cycle

When building your product architecture, you need to think about the long term. Your architecture should support your product from development through all the main stages until you retire the product. A well-thought-out product architecture that has some foresight will make maintenance, upgrades, and support a lot easier. 

Want to know more about your product life cycle? Check out this article about product life cycle management 🔽: 

Focus on user experience

Your product architecture needs to put users first and ensure you create a product that works for their needs. The way features and components interact needs to be intuitive, easy to navigate, and user-friendly. This will improve customer satisfaction and ensure that you delight your customers, allowing you to develop a successful product. 

Use Agile

You need flexibility when creating your product architecture, meaning that it’s best to adopt Agile product development to help you break the design process into smaller, more manageable stages for iterative improvements and quicker customer feedback loops. 

Agile helps teams respond to changes more efficiently, reducing risks and improving overall product quality as development progresses.

Find the balance

You don’t want to build something that’s overly complex just for the sake of it. A product that has a million different things that you can modularize and turn off and on. 

But at the same time, you don’t want to build something that’s really, really tightly coupled that limits your ability to turn a feature on or off without disrupting another. 

Sometimes teams have a habit of over-engineering really early on and trying to make something way too modular. Other times teams try to keep it really simple and then get stuck when they try to make improvements in the future.

You need to find the right balance between this to create an architecture that sets the framework you can work within without being too limiting. 

Building solid foundations 

Product architecture is the blueprint that shapes not only the structure but also the success of your product. From ensuring alignment across teams to improving user experience and scalability, a well-crafted product architecture creates the foundation for innovation and growth. It’s not just about building a product – it’s about building one that lasts, adapts, and thrives in the market.

A strong product architecture helps you maintain consistency, reduce development time, and create a product that’s easy to upgrade without breaking existing features. By organizing your components into clear, functional blocks, you can ensure seamless collaboration between your designers, engineers, and other stakeholders. Plus, a flexible architecture allows you to introduce new features, adopt a pivot strategy in response to market changes, and meet customer demands with agility. With the right foundation, your product can grow and evolve over time, minimizing costly overhauls down the road.

At ProdPad, our approach to product architecture allows us to make innovative changes and updates regularly, improving the customer experience and giving users more tools to become better Product Managers. Explore our always-evolving features in the ProdPad sandbox.