The difference between a product and a project

A project is something you do, a product is something you own.

Project has a start and a finish. If you're lucky, a goal. You get or gather requirements, build the thing, ship, and move on. Done. You measure success by delivering on time and on budget.

Product has no start or finish. You support a business process, workflow, or a type of user. You look for friction in the system and find ways to improve. You are never done. Success looks like happy users, increased revenue, smoother workflows.

This is the key difference between widget factory and empowered teams. The widget factory works on projects, the empowered team owns products.

Projects can help you organize product work – what's the next iteration, how do we get there, what fires need fixing – but you can't own business outcomes, if all you ever do are projects. Then you're just a pair of hands. Someone else owns the product.

And remember: you can't side-quest a product. Many purely engineering initiatives like internal libraries are platform-type products in disguise.

You can use that to build a great promo packet, but don't try to solo own a product long-term with no support. You need time and resources to iterate.

Cheers,
~Swizec