Product Restructuring: From Chaos to Ecosystem
As the product lead of FinClip, we embarked on a comprehensive product restructuring in 2022. This restructuring was not a mere functional upgrade but a systemic transformation from strategy to execution. Below are the core experiences I've summarized from the perspective of a product director.
I. Why Restructure? — Identifying Hidden Systemic Risks
We found the system to be a tangled mess: The initial product design lacked coherence, and the turnover of R&D personnel led to a haphazard addition of features. The development team was still frantically adding new functionalities based on customer demands, delivering hundreds of new requirements each month, which caused the maintenance cost of the product to soar.
What's worse, the R&D cost was growing like a snowball. Investors believed that the product had already passed the 0-1 stage and should not continue to incur substantial costs for customer delivery.
II. How to Restructure? — Breaking the Deadlock with Architectural Thinking
We took three key actions:
- Defining Clear Boundaries: We consolidated dozens of fragmented functional modules into three core sections: "Container Engine," "Development Platform," and "Operations Center." For instance, we integrated the scattered permission management from four modules into a unified service, which increased development efficiency by 40% and reduced vulnerabilities by 62%.
- Layered Decoupling: We redesigned the architecture like building with blocks, reorganized the system architecture and logic diagrams for the entire project, and began a complete redesign from the bottom-layer services and modules.
- Capability Extension: At the beginning of the new version product design, we carefully considered the coupling and extension relationships between different modules. Any new functions that might be added later were logically connected and well-organized.
III. Key Turning Points in Restructuring
- Strategic Alignment: The chairman and CEO of the organization attended the meeting and made the final decision, unifying the goals with the value of restructuring. In the end, the management team approved on the spot: "This restructuring puts us back on the right track."
- Team Transformation: Product managers had to learn to draw domain model diagrams. All the previously neglected underlying design challenges of the product had to be tackled one by one, with careful梳理 of state machines and flow logic.
- Rhythm Alignment: Product managers drove the progress of the restructuring project from start to finish. Even if some participants changed their opinions midway, as long as they didn't explicitly say no, there was still a possibility to continue.
IV. Pitfalls and Future Directions
- Cognitive Upgrade: Product managers need to be able to translate customers' "improve security" demands into "sandbox isolation + dynamic permissions," which requires understanding both business and technology.
- Technological Trends: We tried using large models to analyze code, which increased the efficiency of service dependency analysis by 80%. In the future, we plan to use AI to predict requirements.
Conclusion
Product restructuring is a tough battle. It not only addresses immediate technical debt but also paves the way for development over the next 10 years. Through this restructuring, we not only doubled the system's performance but, more importantly, established the mindset of "architecture as a service." Now, FinClip has become a technical middleware for corporate digital transformation, supporting various innovative scenarios from finance to government affairs. In the future, we will continue to break through with architectural thinking, enabling every enterprise to have its own digital infrastructure.
This article was rewritten using AI. Please refer to the original - https://hiwannz.com/archives/1116.html