On the Market Aspect of Product Program Design: Towards a Definition of an Architecture of the Market

An often overlooked aspect of architecture based product development, is the market aspect. However, without focusing the scope of the product family and ensuring an appropriate layout of product families, variants and features across the product program offerings, experiences show that architecture based product families become rigid, unfocused, prepared for yesterday’s market situation, and ultimately lack profitability. This paper will propose to expand the existing notion of coordinating product and production architectures as a means to develop profitable architectures by including an architecture of the market. This is to be interpreted as the ‘market perspective’ of the product family referring to the design of the product family from the market’s point of view. The main result of this paper is the suggestion of a definition of a market architecture with an articulation of its elements, relations, hierarchical nature and raison d’être. Three action research studies show that defining the market architecture serve as a feasible and operational means of addressing the market aspects in architecture development.