Componentization in E‑commerce Product Development: Three Perspectives on Requirements and Core Component Principles

The speaker, Liu Yinfei, a senior product manager at JD with nearly seven years of product experience across front‑office and middle‑office domains, shares his insights on product planning and design.

Using a computer analogy, the article describes how a finished computer (the product) is built on a motherboard (the platform) that assembles various parts (CPU, GPU, etc.) to serve different business scenarios, emphasizing that components are concrete representations of modular capabilities.

It stresses that components originate from business needs and must return value to those needs; therefore, requirement analysis should start from three viewpoints: the "point" view (individuality of each business need), the "line" view (commonality across multiple needs), and the "surface" view (future‑oriented, time‑dimension planning).

From these viewpoints, three core component requirements are identified: 1) Individuality – flexible configuration and minimal extension cost; 2) Shared Reuse – leveraging mature components to quickly support various scenarios; 3) Business Enablement – providing data‑driven capabilities that empower retailers, brands, and partners.

The article outlines three business layers of components: scenario‑enablement components (serve specific business scenes), shared business components (common building blocks), and domain‑specific components (different fields such as online/offline channels). Examples include the "Shadow SKU" and "Gaia" projects (2016) that focused on "what" components, and the 2017 product knowledge‑graph project that addressed "how" components.

It concludes that componentization is a long‑term endeavor requiring cross‑department collaboration, continuous improvement, and serves as a common language for requirement communication and product manager role differentiation.