Three General Principles for B2B Product Design: A Case Study from NetEase Yanxuan

This article discusses product design methodology and presents three general principles for B2B product design based on the author's experience at NetEase Yanxuan.

Background: Every product aims to meet user needs, solve pain points, and create user value. Products can be classified by target audience (B2C/B2B), client type (wap/app/web), or requirement type (social, transaction, content, tools, gaming, etc.). The product design process consists of four phases: product definition, product design, product development, and product operations.

Principle 1: Systems Need Clear Boundaries, Services Need Clear Ownership When product matrix is limited, system boundaries are usually clear. However, with complex business domains and interactions, boundary and collaboration issues arise. Without clear ownership, similar functions lead to duplicate development and high maintenance costs. The example given is the "warehouse binding relationship" in supply chain systems, which was initially used only for procurement but later expanded to inter-warehouse transfer and fulfillment scenarios, causing confusion about which system should own this data.

Principle 2: When Interactive Systems Reach Scale and Problems Become Frequent, Recognize the Importance of Order In early system construction, "working" and "sufficient" are often the goals without excessive design. But as business scale and complexity grow, single-point problems are amplified. Establishing universal rules to constrain system interactions, along with different control measures for varying degrees of "violations," becomes essential. The inventory system example illustrates this: when multiple upstream services simultaneously make dense calls to the same product inventory status without proper specifications (duplicate single-state calls, continuous-state skip calls, incomplete calls), it causes a chain of inventory "accidents."

Principle 3: Abstracting Rules Based on Objects is Far More Important Than End-to-End Process Digitization While B2B products typically have clear user requirements and moving these processes online is important, simply organizing and digitizing processes is not enough. For general-purpose features, abstracting rules and capabilities during design can transform a single-point function into a scalable general capability. The COVID-19 case demonstrates this: during the Wuhan lockdown, the business needed to block all orders except medical supplies from being dispatched. Rather than building a simple order-blocking feature for this single scenario, the design was abstracted into three general steps: (1) condition settings (order, user, product, address dimensions), (2) rule engine (condition combination and priority assembly), and (3) business decisions (whether to split orders, block orders, or schedule delayed推送).

Conclusion: The author emphasizes that understanding the "underlying logic" of things is the prerequisite for extracting methodology. When facing changes, underlying logic can always be applied to generate new methodologies. The key is to not just complete tasks, but to reflect on why things are done in certain ways and identify patterns and connections between different tasks.