The importance of flexibility in product architecture is best understood through the product life cycle and the demand it places on the enterprise. The product life cycle was introduced by Theodore Levitt in Exploit the Product Life Cycle more than 43 years ago.
The product life cycle as described in the classic article consists of the following stages
1. Market Development
2. Market Growth
3. Market Maturity
4. Market Decline
Market Development is when a product is introduced into the market. This is when the demand is created by enabling potential customers to try the product which is continuously tuned to make it attractive. This tuning and the enveloping discovery process assumes that the product architecture has provisions for customizations that make the tuning possible. If the product lacks the flexibility that is needed to make it attractive, it will never see the light of day.
Market Growth is when there is a marked increase in customer demand. All the focus is then on ensuring that the product development and delivery scales to meet the demand. While scalability is of the highest priority here, this is when an enterprise has the money to focus on not only making sure that it is maintaining the flexibility dimensions needed for its current life cycle, but it has to also focus on identifying any flexibility dimensions that it needs once this growth decelerates. This is also the stage when potential competitors jump into the fray, and again flexibility is key to differentiate the product to stave off competition.
Market Maturity is when growth slows and the focus shifts to delivering the product more efficiently. Flexibility helps in replacing the components that may be cheaper to implement with newer technologies. The competition also shifts to pricing, and being able to introduce more efficiencies easily (another form of flexibility) is critical. This stage is also when an enterprise is looking out to return to growth by either expanding to other customer segments through tailoring the product or developing new products through the capabilities it may have developed. In both cases, flexibility is key. First, expanding to other customer segments means that the product needs to provide means to customize it to those segments. Second, reuse of capabilities for developing a new product comes from past investments in maintaining the flexibility dimensions.
Market Decline is when the product loses customer appeal. Perhaps there is a new product that is better and cheaper. If the enterprise has paid attention to flexibility, it should have the ammunition to be able to decommission the product gracefully, while focussing on the growth of its new products.
At the end, flexibility is a key priority that is often overlooked. Too much of flexibility is a potential cause of lower performance and high cost of over engineering. This is where understanding the business priorities and strategies as well as the evolution in customer demands, is very important to understand what flexibility dimensions are important for product architecture.
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