Real products combine multiple archetypes. The seams between archetypes are where most failure modes appear.
| Product | Archetypes | Key Seam |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube | A4 + A1 + A2 | A4↔︎A1: video metadata must be indexed within minutes of upload completing |
| Uber | A3 + A5 + A1 | A3↔︎A5: surge pricing ML model must consume real-time location and demand data |
| Stripe | A3 + A6 | A3↔︎A6: transaction APIs must be both reliable (A3) and developer-friendly (A6) |
| Netflix | A4 + A1 | A4↔︎A1: recommendation engine (A1) drives content discovery that feeds the A4 delivery layer |
| Slack | A2 + A6 | A2↔︎A6: messaging (A2) exposed as a platform with integrations (A6) |
The seam problem: When archetype A needs data from archetype B, a consistency boundary exists at that seam. That boundary must be named, designed, and monitored. The most common production incidents occur at seams that were not explicitly designed.