Products Are Relations

Often I wonder why most products fail.

This I find very strange, so many minds dedicating their lives to products that don’t make it.

Time and again we hear how incredibly hard talented teams devote all their energy to create products and yet it feels that all that effort is not paying back. I believe that these failing products have one thing in common:

They have been conceived as things as opposed to relations.

A vision of products as things comes from a need for efficiency, which is a very important part, but the trouble is that we need to know when to also open to an interpretation based on relationships.

When a product is questioned due to its lack of success, the product is made accountable through indicators that establish that fixing those indicators will fix the product. Consequently, new things are added in the hope that the newly updated product will become complete.

If you think of products as things made of things, which are then inserted in other things, then you are missing on what makes everything around you: Relationships.

Anything that interacts or is capable of interacting is a relationship, one that cannot be engineered transactionally and objectively alone, because is a relationship to all kinds of things, many of which can barely be described.

A product that interacts with people is a relationship with them, with their contexts, their tone, their enquiring minds, their models and conceptualisations of the world which are unique to them.

Meanwhile we, makers of products, are busy trying to build products that don’t deliver but to themselves, inventing surrounding metrics, methods, principles and further products that in turn serve those products, leaving out that which is more defining. All together this is a very paradoxical way of looking at products unless your see people as needs alone.

The summary of the point that I am trying to make is that to see products as features is to see ourselves as things, something we must find obscene.

I see products that have failed to deliver immersed in pathways that are going nowhere driven by makers who amble around solutions without realising that a product works if it relates and it fails when it does not.

This has nothing to do with whether a product does as much as possible, as fast as possible. Doing products that do more does not mean doing products that are better.

We need to accept that products are destined to provoke feelings, we need to be easy about this aspiration.