Your Product Might Not Be “The Product”
Warning! ❗
I don’t mean to confuse you… but maybe I do 😐.
I want to ask you, is your product really “the product?”.
I don’t mean “is your product the right product?”. Nah that’s a topic for another day.
This was exactly my facial expression when I stumbled on this video. It’s exactly week 1 of Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals a product management course by Alex Cowan of the University of Virginia.
This might just be an attempt to sound philosophical 🙂.
Let’s start with a definition. Product as defined by Product school is a purchasable, downloadable, or freely attainable entity — be it something physical, downloadable, or accessible online— that delivers value.
According to Google dictionary, a Product is an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale.
Now try to think about the first time you recognized a problem and decided to build a product for it — your journey from finding a problem to finding its solution. That might not be the case for everyone.
Try to remember the state of a product from the first time you joined a team to now. A lot has changed, right?
Remember how Instagram or Facebook was a few years ago? It is a whole lot different from how we met it even as users.
So I decided to do research and I came across two answers, the first of which this article is based on, and the other I’m not so sure about.
Product is the Solution
Some people might have guessed this right from when they read my introduction, or you’re well acquainted with this topic.
Yes, your product is just a tiny aspect of the actual product, and what you sell to customers is the solution. That’s why in product marketing, it’s advised to market solutions to customers. You highlight the needs of prospective customers and then propose the solution.
Your product, being used to solve that problem is ever-evolving, you are constantly trying to improve the desirability of a product but your solution remains the same.
Take your time and think of any tech product you use, you can tour around your phone, there are lots of examples to use there. So it all starts with finding the right problem and then iterating to the right solution.
Product vs Solution
The product example used in this course is iTunes. First they identified a problem which is having to load music unto a device. Then it was matched to a solution, which is a music player that loads music directly to your device without a third party software. iTunes was the product of that proposed solution and it was a massive success.
Product is the business model
Ash Maurya explains how your business model is also the product. He emphasized using the lean startup and the business model canvas by Alex Osterwalder to make a business model.
This isn’t quite under the scope of what this article is about but if this is something you want to discuss, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Let’s talk!
In my own opinion — this topic isn’t explicitly explained and I would have liked to hear more about it. It was just scratching the surface and we weren’t given an in-depth explanation. As a result — it left us to go and do our research, which is not a terrible thing.
If you are taking this course I advise you to do the same as I did. It expands your horizons and think and draw conclusions about the topic — leaving you with an increase in your puddle of knowledge.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
