What is a product, platform and service?

This article makes references to the Kanplexity guide, which can be downloaded, free of charge, here.

If you have people in product development or product management, in Scrum for example, if you have a product owner who’s supposed to be on the hook for maximizing value … what is the product?

(I have a podcast episode on what is value, which is available here….)

Product is not project and vice versa

A lot of people conflate product with project even if I explain what product is.

It’s almost as if there’s an automatic substitution of the words.

I like what Bas Vodde, one of the co-creators of Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) says: “A product does not have scope”.

“A product does not have scope”

I thought yes! A product is for the long term. A project has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

We have lots of long-term initiatives. Are they all products then is the question.

I like what Craig Larman says, paraphrasing so it is not exactly what he said, but “a product is something that basically an external customer/end-user would recognize and probably pay for it with their money or their data or some other consideration”.

“a product is something that basically an external customer/end-user would recognize and probably pay for it with their money or their data or some other consideration”

Platform vs product and vice versa

I was doing some work with a German bank over the last year and I was doing some product owner training when someone said to me that their product was Salesforce.

I said, I don’t think your product is Salesforce because you’re not salesforce.com.

You don’t sell Salesforce. You just use Salesforce as a platform to underpin a service or product that you’re offering to your end customers. Correct?