Product, Product Surfaces, and Product Enablers

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What is a Product?

It is something that requires effort to make and someone finds it valuable enough to give up money or time in exchange to use it. For example, we spend money to use the iPhone and we give up time to use TikTok. Both products are made with human effort. 

AI idea of product surfaces and product enablers


What is a Product surface?

The part of the product which a user utilizes to interact with the product. For example, Google search webpage is a product surface which is part of the Google search product. The product has other surfaces for advertisers, mobile app users, and users who use voice to interact with the product, etc.. Search algorithms are part of the Google search product but they work behind the scenes with the user interaction occurring via the product surface. 

What are product enablers?

The part of the product that the users don’t  see but are necessary for the product to perform and for the organization to build the product. For example, the technologies and tools used to make the product including cloud storage and compute, software development environments, project management tools, and A/B testing tools, etc. are all product enables for software products.  

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