When Customer Accounts Turn Into a Product Ecosystem

Customer, partner, supplier, and employee portals often require a shared core to avoid fragmentation as businesses expand their offerings. When a supplier alters a delivery date, the ERP system updates the value, yet the customer portal may still display the outdated information. This issue arises not from a single integration failure but due to the gradual growth of a product's audiences - customers, partners, suppliers, and employees.

Initially, a single portal handles orders, invoices, documents, support requests, and more. However, as the product evolves, additional portals emerge, each with its own set of accounts, directories, statuses, permissions, and integrations.

The real question becomes whether the company is constructing an additional product atop the existing business reality, rather than merely adding another portal. This can lead to a situation where a fifth portal creates a fifth version of the same status, causing confusion and inefficiency. For instance, one contractor could have multiple names across different products, requiring changes to travel through several systems.

Similarly, a partner may represent various legal entities, while an employee might switch between branches, and a customer may gain administrative rights for their organization.

To address these challenges, four operational signals can help assess the situation: time to onboard a new role, the frequency of requests regarding access, statuses, and documents, the number of systems capable of changing an entity, and the test scope of new features. These metrics indicate whether the basics are being rebuilt each time, leading to delays in product launches or reliance on email and spreadsheets.

Ultimately, a product ecosystem requires a shared layer for business rules, encompassing entities such as organizations, users, documents, payments, permissions, events, and integrations. This layer enables distinct interfaces for different audiences while maintaining consistency in the underlying business processes. For example, in the Altprof project, a customer publishes a task, chooses an executor, a specialist works with responses and orders, and the business team manages users, roles, payments, and critical scenarios.

By establishing a shared profile for every important entity and defining the authoritative system for each key entity, businesses can streamline their operations, improve support, and enhance auditing processes.