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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • icon picker
            3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
        • Part II. The role of the product managr
          • Chapter 6. Bad product manager archetypes
          • Chapter 7. A great product manager
          • Chapter 8. The product manager career path
          • Chapter 9. Organising your teams
        • Part III. Strategy
          • Chapter 10. What is strategy?
          • Chapter 11. Strategic gaps
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
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3. Projects versus products versus services
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3. Projects versus products versus services

Products are vehicles of value. They deliver value repeatedly to customers and users, without requiring the company to build something new every time. These can be hardware, software, consumer packaged goods, or any other artifacts in which human intervention is not needed to achieve value for the user.
Microsoft Excel, baby food, Tinder, the iPhone—these are all products. Services, unlike products, use human labor to primarily deliver value to the user. Service-based organizations are design agencies that create logos or brands for businesses, or they could be accounting companies where an accountant does your taxes. These services can be “productized,” where they are the same service for the same price for every customer, but they still inherently need people to execute them. They can also be automated for scale, by creating a software product that executes on the service.
Many companies use a combination of products and services to deliver value. For example, many software companies that have an on-premises model, meaning they install the software directly on the computers of their users and have a services team go in and do the installation, customization, and setup. Any services or products that you need to be successful should be optimized together as a system to increase the flow of value to the user.
This is where projects come in. A project is a discrete scope of work that has a particular aim. It usually has a deadline, milestones, and specific outputs that will be delivered. When projects are complete, the aim is reached, and you move on to the next one. Projects are an essential part of product development, but the mentality of thinking only in projects will cause damage.
You need the discipline to move toward organizing for products over projects. Companies that optimize their products to achieve value are called product-led organizations. These organizations are characterized by product-driven growth, scaling their organization through software products, and optimizing them until they reach the desired outcomes.
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