Toys, tools, products
A foundational part of product management, often overlooked, is understanding the difference between toys, tools, and products.
Toys are experiences rather than solutions. They delight us, invite curiosity, and provide intrinsic enjoyment. A good toy doesn't necessarily accomplish anything practical, but that's the point: delight is the whole measure of success.
Tools, by contrast, are explicitly designed to solve problems. A hammer doesn't build a chair on its own; it demands your effort, skill, and intention. Tools have versatility, providing a blank canvas for creativity. Their strength lies in their adaptability, though that flexibility comes at the cost of effort and expertise from the user.
Products, then, sit distinctly apart. They solve problems for you, reducing your effort significantly or enhancing your capabilities dramatically. Products have strong opinions about how problems should be tackled, embodying a clear vision of "good." This opinionation makes products very useful, yet sometimes less versatile.
Consider Adobe Photoshop. Often mistaken as a product, it's really a sophisticated toolkit, a collection of powerful tools demanding considerable skill and intentionality to get real value out of. This is neither inherently good nor bad, but it's worth recognising the distinction as a product manager.
There's an inherent trade-off as you transition from tool to product. To deliver effortless value, a product must become increasingly opinionated about the ideal process or outcome. This opinionation is a strength, clarifying purpose and reducing friction, but it's also a limitation that can narrow what the product is good for.
Where products falter, sliding back into toolkits, it's typically because they've failed to maintain a strong enough viewpoint. Without clear opinions on "what good looks like," they leave users stranded in complexity, shifting the burden of understanding back onto them.
In product management, the insight lies in consciously choosing your position on this spectrum: the delightful simplicity of toys, the adaptable power of tools, or the confident utility of a product.
Additional note, 12/04/2025: AI is reshaping this spectrum. It adds a layer of usability on top of complex toolkits, turning tools that used to demand real skill into something closer to products, with far less effort needed from the user.