Design product families on a shared backbone while keeping room for differentiation at the edges. Test your judgment on where to standardise, how to govern, and which risks to control.
Which layer is the best candidate for standardisation in a platform strategy to maximise reuse without constraining differentiation?
regional feature toggles only
customer‑facing UI and brand elements
pricing rules and promotions
non‑differentiating subsystems and shared services
What is the primary economic benefit teams seek from shared components across a product family?
guaranteed premium pricing regardless of competition
elimination of all testing effort
faster time‑to‑market and lower total engineering cost through reuse at scale
higher bill‑of‑materials per unit
Which governance approach best balances speed and consistency for platform adoption?
a central committee that must approve every merge
ban versioning to keep everyone on latest only
each product team forks platform code indefinitely
paved roads with self‑service components, clear API contracts, and guardrails
Which KPI most directly indicates that platform work is paying off?
number of platform engineers hired
size of the platform backlog
cross‑product reuse rate (consuming products per component)
attendance at platform ceremonies
What risk grows when many SKUs depend on a single shared component?
marketing cannibalisation between brands
patent pool exhaustion
only vendor lock‑in on cloud compute
common‑mode failure that can cascade across the portfolio
How should you evolve a widely‑used shared API without breaking teams?
rewrite every consumer in a single big‑bang release
hide breaking changes behind feature flags only
change payloads silently and expect clients to adapt
introduce versioned interfaces and deprecate old versions with a clear window
Where should you concentrate variability when designing the platform?
only in the CI/CD pipeline
buried inside core platform modules
at extension points closest to customer‑facing features
primarily inside test fixtures
Which funding model helps avoid ‘platform for platform’s sake’?
treat platform as a stand‑alone cost centre with headcount targets
100% charge‑back to consuming teams regardless of value
tie platform investments to product P&L outcomes and shared OKRs
only one‑off capex at the start then no opex
A shared component has become too generic and slows delivery. What is the most effective remedy?
split it into smaller domain‑aligned modules and allow multiple implementations behind contracts
add more mandatory reviews to every change
freeze all change requests to stabilise it
move unique product logic into the platform
Which architectural pattern directly reduces the blast radius of failures in shared services?
using one database for all products
a shared global cache with no quotas
bulkhead/isolation across tenants or product lines
centralising everything behind a single global queue
Starter
Great start—review the core concepts and patterns for this topic.
Solid
Strong performance—tighten definitions and apply them to edge cases.
Expert!
Outstanding—translate these insights into system design and decisions.
