From Products to Suite: Establishing a Business Platform

ou start by building a product for a specific market segment and its users. The focus is simple: build what is necessary to make the product successful. Reuse is not a priority.
Then new ideas emerge. Your boss has plans for a second and a third product, each targeting different market segments and different users.
Now a question appears: should these products be merged from the start, or should they remain fully autonomous?

In this talk I will share the journey of how several autonomous products, initially built without shared capabilities, gradually evolved into a suite of products. Along the way we established a business platform that exposes capabilities our applications can build upon.

I’ll walk through how we identified business and technical capabilities in our existing products, and how we began thinking more strategically about our product landscape. A key influence was Jabe Bloom’s idea of the “Three Economies”, which helped guide how we approached building the platform.
The result is a platform that allows us to run experiments quickly and evaluate new business ideas in the market.

If you’re interested in a real-world story of applying Domain-Driven Design ideas in greenfield product development, this talk shares what worked for us—and what we learned along the way.

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