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Software Architecture Challenge

Software Architecture Challenge: Flexibility vs. Product Integrity

This software architecture challenge involves enabling tenant-specific customization in a multi-tenant SaaS while maintaining product integrity and maintainability. What would YOU do as a Software Architect in this scenario?

Software Architecture Challenge: Flexibility vs. Product Integrity

What would YOU do as a Software Architect in the following scenario❓

Comment directly under the post and help me find the right approach here.

The Scenario

Listen to the following scenario I faced and help me find a proper solution. 👇

The real world scenario

If you're interested in my suggested approach, you'll find it later at the end of this post.

Transcript

"Customer X needs this specific customization. We can’t afford to lose them.", said Thomas, our product manager, to Rachel, our Product Owner, and me as software architect.

"And Customer Y wants a different workflow than the standard one.", Rachel added.

Suddenly, our clean product was under real pressure.

Sales push for speed.

Engineering wants a maintainable solution.

So we sat down as a team - the PO, engineers, and I - and discussed three options:

Option 1 - Hard-coded conditionals:

Add logic like ‘if tenant is Customer X, skip step three’ directly in the code.

Option 2 - Configuration layer:

Use per-tenant feature flags - to control which fields, steps, or rules apply.

Option 3 - Extension points:

Create customization hooks to allow each customer to inject their own rule or workflow logic cleanly.

What would YOUR approach be to solve it?

Comment directly under the post and help me find the right approach here.

Helping resources

Here you'll find supporting software architecture resources to solve this architecture challenge 👇

📝 Blog Posts and other useful Web Resources

💬 Talks

📚 Books

My approach

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