Information Architecture, Product Architecture, and Business Architecture

From the book "Behind the Scenes Products" by Netease Music Cloud Product Manager:

The relationship between information architecture, product architecture and business architecture can be considered progressive: information architecture is the front-end
presentation layer architecture, and product architecture is the connection between business and user presentation layer The product function and system architecture, and the business architecture
is the architecture of the business operation mechanism including business logic, as shown in Figure 7-3. If you look at it the other way around,
the information architecture is actually deduced step by step from the business architecture, and then presented to the user with the front-end presentation layer. Therefore
, it can be said that the business architecture is the core, the product architecture is the skeleton, and the information architecture is the texture.

   Let's take NetEase Cloud Music as an example to see what the information architecture, product architecture, and business architecture are. The business structure of NetEase
Cloud Music needs to be seen in the music industry. The business generally includes content copyright, musicians, NetEase
Cloud Music platform, social business, video business, etc. Business architecture is to design what business is the driving wheel and
how to cooperate with each other to achieve the goal of overall development. This is what Amazon CEO Bezos called the
"flywheel effect", and it also includes the business model design of the business. The product architecture is
how we abstract and integrate the design of the product system to support the business with the most appropriate architecture. For example, we use the UGC system to link
content , platform business, social business, video business, etc. The big background of end content contributors to
open up services for B end users in various businesses. The information architecture is to
present the key points of the product specified in the business architecture and product architecture to the user in an appropriate way in the design of the app and each product, for example, the
organization form of the information unit in the design product, The main navigation of the App, the hierarchy of each main page and the jumping process
, etc.
     From this example, we can see that information architecture, product architecture, and business architecture are progressive and interrelated
, and there will be intersections between them. For example, the intersection of information architecture and product architecture lies in the design and
interface presentation of product systems; the intersection of product architecture and business architecture lies in the sorting out of business processes, etc. In fact, when a
simple product is born, its business and products are relatively simple, so we often do not need to consider information architecture,
product architecture, and business architecture separately, but coordinate them together. When the business and products we face become
complex, we need to think and design these three architectures separately in the workflow, so as to ensure that each architecture is
thought deeply and accurately, and at the same time, we need to ensure that the architectures are mutually consistent. Can be seamlessly connected together to avoid confusion
. This puts forward very high requirements on the ability of the product manager. It requires the product manager to be able to
think from the bottom up starting from the information architecture, and also to think from the top down starting from the business architecture, so as to ensure the consistency of the architecture. Cultivating
this ability requires a lot of thinking and practice on the architecture, constantly going from the outside to the inside, and from the inside to the outside.