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Product

The product layer is the why and what of Tomoda — the story behind each feature and the spec each feature has to honour. It sits above the engineering docs: by the time you reach Architecture or Backend Services, the product layer has already told you what experience the code is meant to produce.

How this section is split

The product layer is three layers stacked from most narrative to most precise:

Layer Voice Reader's question
Vision Pitch / manifesto What is Tomoda and why does it exist?
Bible Per-feature narrative — the story of one system Why does this feature exist? What experience are we trying to create?
Domains Per-feature spec — states, rules, invariants What are the rules of this system? What does it promise?

Read top-down: vision is the elevator pitch, the bible is the PM-to-designer explanation of each feature, and the domains are the engineer-to-engineer reference for the rules each feature has to obey.

Reading order

  1. Vision — start here. One page. The elevator pitch.
  2. Bible → Brand — the voice, the principles, the way the product feels. Everything else inherits from this.
  3. One bible page per system you care about (identity, events, friends, discovery, moments, chat, presence, payments, locations).
  4. The matching domain spec when you need rules, not story.

What lives where

You want… Read
Pitch / elevator copy Vision
The story of a feature ("why is it like this?") Bible
The rules of a feature ("what are the states / invariants?") Domains
How a screen behaves for the user ux/ (coming soon)
Visual tokens, components, colour, motion Style Guide
How a feature is wired in code Backend Services / Frontend

Editing this section

The product layer describes the present. If a feature isn't built yet, either omit it or mark it explicitly with a stub admonition — don't pretend it ships. When a feature lands, update the matching bible page (story) and domain page (spec) in the same change.

The bible's voice is manifesto-adjacent: it's allowed to be opinionated and narrative. The domain's voice is reference-adjacent: tables, short prose, no marketing. Don't mix the two.