ERP

Schedules and Status as an Information Layer, Not a Product

Why some modules exist purely to make every other module more reliable.

ERP
Schedules and Status as an Information Layer, Not a Product</picture>
ERP·3 min read·from Zuma Flights

Not every module on a platform needs to generate revenue directly to be worth building. Zuma Flights — live schedule and status data — mostly exists to make Zuma Air Tickets, Zuma Tourism, and Zuma Safaris more reliable, by giving those modules a shared, accurate source of flight information rather than each maintaining its own.

Treating flight status as a shared internal service rather than a product feature owned by one team avoids a common failure mode in platforms with many verticals: three different teams each build their own flight-status integration because it's "just for their feature," and three years later there are three slightly-inconsistent sources of truth for the same underlying data, none of which anyone fully trusts.

Identifying which pieces of your platform are genuinely shared infrastructure — versus which are product features that happen to look similar — is a design decision worth making explicitly early, because retrofitting three duplicate systems into one shared service later is far more expensive than building the shared service first.

1
shared flight-data service
3+
modules depending on it
0
duplicate status integrations
Live module

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