Note 06 · product
Product thinking changes engineering
Architecture should exist because of a user / business / system problem, not because a technology is fashionable.
Smart Trader started as a strategy and became a product when the constraint "must run for real every day" was added. That constraint forced the architecture to be honest: provider fallback, risk gates, additive endpoints, staged deploys, an operator dashboard that is itself a product surface.
Engineering is most powerful when it is the answer to a specific question. The question is never "what is fashionable?" — it is "what does this system need to do, for whom, under what constraints, and what evidence will it produce?".