Explore Product-Modeling Patterns
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Summarize standard product-modeling patterns.
- Identify the advantages and disadvantages of different techniques.
- Recognize product-modeling scenarios.
Product-Modeling Patterns
Devi has gathered his company’s product and pricing requirements and explored Shared Catalog tools to streamline product design. He’s nearly ready to start modeling products. But first, he wants to understand the modeling approaches product designers use to build products in the Shared Catalog. These standard patterns include:
- Hard bundling, which uses a hierarchical pattern
- Flat pattern, also called offer meiosis
- Attribute-based, otherwise known as a field-based approach
- Promotion-based, to offer discounts or other incentives
Each pattern offers a different way to create product relationships in Shared Catalog and to support consistency in how products are configured and sold.
Cardinality is an important concept in modeling. With Shared Catalog, you can efficiently manage individual and group cardinality requirements, which are the default minimum and maximum allowable quantities of products and bundles.
Though Shared Catalog gives you plenty of ways to set up product relationships, modelers often choose from these primary patterns when designing their catalog architecture, combining patterns as needed. Let’s explore each one.
Hard Bundling
Hard bundling is one of the most common product-modeling patterns. In this strategy, catalog items are set up as a hierarchy of individual elements under a single offer with its own price. This pattern is best for representing complex bundling relationships and dependencies across different products and services.
In this diagram, the commercial offer uses a hierarchical pattern with one child product.
The nested product, Child Product 1, represents an optional add-on or included service with its own price. The cardinality defines the sellable quantity allowed for the child product. In this case, the minimum value is 0, and the maximum and default values are 1.
When possible, reuse components across product offers, which saves time and reduces maintenance. You can also price child products differently depending on which offer is added to the Cart.
One drawback of hard bundling is that during order capture, the Cart must render the complete product hierarchy of mandatory and optional child products, which can degrade system performance.
Flat Pattern
The flat pattern modeling approach is also called offer meiosis. You may be familiar with the term meiosis from your late-night cramming for that science exam (Remember? It’s different from mitosis!). In the natural world, meiosis is the process by which organic cells divide into child cells. In product modeling, meiosis means defining each product as a separate, independent hierarchy. This pattern works best when you have several exclusive offers with diverging configurations.
The diagram shows an example of a flat-pattern product model including two commercial offers, each with its own separate hierarchy of parent and child products and prices.
The first commercial offer has a price associated with it, as does Child Product 1. The second commercial offer has two child products. Both offers use the same child product.
Now that you've seen an example product model using a flat pattern, let’s see how some offers look in real-time. A business may offer four separate optional add-on packages with their own sets of products and unique pricing. 
Notice that each subscription package contains different configurations and prices. The customer chooses a best-fit package based on their preferences.
Attribute-Based
So far, we’ve seen patterns with child products set up as product bundles or individual products in the catalog. An attribute-based, or field-based, modeling pattern takes a different approach.
With this pattern, you set up products, services, and product characteristics as attributes or attribute values on the parent product.
As the diagram shows, each child product in the offer is set up as an attribute that controls the offer price. This method works well for products that share a lot of common data.
A drawback is that certain advanced configurations, such as attribute-based eligibility rules, may be challenging to implement and maintain with this approach. On the flipside, it reduces the number of order items to manage during sales and post-sales operations, which leads to better runtime performance in the Cart.
Promotion-Based
Promotions is an optional layer that you can apply on top of the three main product modeling patterns: hard, flat, and attribute-based. Promotion-based modeling is commonly used to promote a product offer or bundle during a particular event or season to maximize sales. It’s important to include plans for how to create promotions in your product model.
In the Shared Catalog, you can easily create and apply promotions to provide offers at discounted prices over a specific time period. This diagram shows a limited-time promotional price applied to the parent offer.
Now, let’s test your knowledge of product-modeling patterns with a quick quiz.
Which pattern works best for each scenario?
Product-Modeling Scenarios
Why choose one modeling pattern over another? As you’ve learned, each one has advantages and disadvantages. Catalog architects often take a hybrid approach that mixes two or more patterns.
To illustrate, let’s follow Devi as he works through some business scenarios to decide the best way to model products.
Cloud-Based Platform
In this scenario, Infiwave plans to launch a new cloud-based platform with HD and 4K streaming options. To create the product model, Devi could use a hierarchical pattern to build a separate bundle for each streaming option. However, separate offers mean more maintenance if the product changes in the future.
So instead, he opts for an attribute-based modeling pattern and configures the streaming options as platform characteristics. The diagram shows an example product model.
The Cloud Platform product has a Streaming Quality attribute and a picklist with assigned rules to define the price of each selection. Separately priced attribute values for HD and 4K are associated with the Streaming Quality attribute. This simplified relationship reduces product upkeep and supports high performance at runtime in the Cart.
Streaming Channels
In order to expand its market presence, Infiwave decides to offer a news channel and a sports channel through satellite coverage. Each of these channels will have its own pricing. Subscribers can purchase them together or separately, and they can cancel one or both channels at any time.
Devi knows that the company adds and removes channels in the catalog to support evolving business goals. For this reason, he uses a flat-pattern approach to create two distinct products, assigning the right pricing to each one.
The diagram shows two separate products, InfiStream News and InfiStream Sports, each priced at $4.99 per month. Having distinct products gives Devi more control over individual products and pricing.
Satellite Entertainment Package
In our last example, Infiwave was expanding its market presence by offering entertainment packages through satellite coverage. This way, customers can subscribe to these services without a fiber connection.
The resulting satellite offer includes two packages: one for HD and another for 4K streaming, each with a different price. Each offer allows customers to record live broadcasts. While the HD option is provided in all regions, 4K is limited to certain geographies.
This product-model diagram shows the HD Satellite product bundle at $79.99 per month, which contains HD Streaming and Live Recording child products.
The 4K Satellite product bundle has 4K Streaming and Live Recording child products. Both bundles include a promotion that gives new subscribers the first 3 months free.
Because of the key difference of the HD and 4K options, Devi uses a flat pattern, or offer-meiosis approach. The resulting packages are two separate products that share the Live Recording child product.
Looking Ahead
Devi (and you!) now understands that effective product modeling relies on knowing how to price, sell, and package products. Consider the effort required to maintain individual products in the catalog and how certain configurations may affect system performance. Remember, collaborating with stakeholders helps you decide the best product-modeling pattern, or mix of patterns, for your business.
In the next unit, you learn about common data modeling techniques and industry best practices for streamlining product modeling.