Baseline Conceptual Models: Product Specification Model

Product Specification Model:  Products are goods and services that a company provides.   This model tries its best to include cloud based products and services as well as your basic product line.  Its not bullet proof but will get you along way in thinking about how you might model your product line.

Goods: Goods are physical things in which a customer can lay their hands on like a device.   They can also be a card a person can buy that has a product key on it the activate features on a given product.  They can be a gift card that represents monetary value that can be applied to a subscription or a product purchase.  They can also be a digital asset that the customer can download and store on their device.  Goods are made up of physical parts or digital files.

Services: Services are more complex.   A service can provide a range of access to products, infrastructure, expert labor, trouble shooting, and education to the customer.  They can represent a product or technology infrastructure as a service such as a cloud service like Azure, Google, Facebook, or Amazon.

Product Relationship:  A product can relate to other products like being optional accessories to a main product.   They can be products relating as part of the same family of products.  They can be competing products if your a store caring competing products.

Product Keys: See Product Key Unlock and Activation Model
  
Digital Benefit Specifications:  Products may have one or more digital benefits that can be assigned.  Each benefit can be predefined and assigned to one or more product. 

• Metered Benefits are benefits that are metered when used such as processing time or storage space.   
• Client Licenses are benefits that enable a cloud service to provide seats to a service.  This is different then product keys in that client licenses can be as simple as registering an party as an account member to an account and granting them entitlement to a seat.  
• Download Benefits are benefits that entitle a customer to download a given set of digital assets such as products, documents, etc...
• Feature Benefits are benefits that entitle a customer a set of cloud side or client site features.

Note:  In this model a part can be a product.   But please note that a part can be made of one or more parts in the part bill of material (BOM).   And a product can be bundled with other products in an offer.  Please see Part Bill of Material (BOM) Model  and Product Offer and Pricing Model.

Please see (Baseline Conceptual Models Commentary) for further details on what conceptual models are to be used for.