Finished Products

Thursday, February 11, 2016 · 2 min read

A persepctive on when products are done.

I’m not sure there is a finished product.

Good products are always evolving. Even some of the oldest products have changed over the years. Iterating on what made them great in the first place.

The time it takes to go from one version to the next has definetly changed. I might update this post three or four times. Publishing it in a publically viewable way. There are posts on this site, and there will be more. Each new addition is a feature added to the product that is this website.

That might be an esoteric example, but the parallels are no different when you switch over to a commonplace product. Digital has the fastest times between idea, synthesis and delivery. It has also enabled ever-faster cycles on phyisical products.

Predictive delivery, optimization by machine, and automation drive towards the belief that you can have instant gratification.

The role of the conductor becomes even more important as we ship things faster; they orchestrate the logistics of delivery.

Yet it is not the operations pipeline that ultimately yields value to the customer. Though an important part of the system, the experience with the prodcut is what the user returns to.

This enables all kinds of interesting side effects with product adoption. In some cases it has flipped traditional logistics on it’s head.