In response to some comments on a blog post of mine regarding the "meat of Web 2.0" I felt compelled to share with the commenter an encapsulation that I wrote some time back about what makes a product.
While the description clearly speaks to an ideal, I think that it holds up equally well against both products and services.
With so much talk these days about such and such offering being a feature and not a product, and axioms like "it is better to build half a product than a half-assed one," I'd be interested in your take. In your mind, what makes a product?
This is my take. A product is an amalgam of an integrated set of functions that work caveat free, are thoroughly QA’ed, documented, have a logical workflow from the standpoint of the end user (not its maker), whose features/solution set match up with marketing’s articulation and sales’ ability and approach to selling it.
A product has a structure in place for delivering a compelling out-of-the-box experience as well mechanisms for elegantly handling when things go wrong.
At its core, a product is designed to fit the market requirements of a specific customer like a glove. The customer hires that product to enable them to complete a specific job, whose metrics of success are defined by specific outcomes and boundaries are expressed as constraints.
Take away any of these components or fail to satisfy these conditions, and a product isn’t.
