Productivity as a Product: You’re Building Products, Not Just Tools

Imagine you’re running a startup that sells bread. But not just any bread. This is highly experimental, handcrafted, possibly AI-assisted bread. Because of course it is. You’re proud of the recipe, but growing this company means doing far more than just baking a loaf.

In this small startup bakery, the team wears many hats. One moment, someone’s a baker. The next, they’re handling customer support, writing distributor documentation, or running marketing campaigns. Some hats are easy to pass around. Others demand focus, skill, or specialized knowledge. Selling bread turns out to be about much more than baking. It’s about running a product company.

Productivity-enabling teams in large companies face similar pressures. You might build tools, maintain frameworks, patch quirks in shared systems, write custom linters, create internal CLIs, or set up deployment pipelines. Anything that helps others move faster. But you’re not just baking code. You’re shaping your product offerings. In a large organization, the goal is to invest in offerings that have an outsized impact. Success depends on more than just technical quality. Like the bakery, it hinges on product-market fit, discoverability, support, and adoption. The hats required to make these products successful often include engineering, documentation, support, and evangelism. Most of the time, the engineering team wears all of them, whether or not anyone is especially suited to the role.

You might not call it that, but you wear the same hats. Marketing means writing release notes, launch announcements, and pitch decks. Customer support is answering Slack questions or debugging integrations. Sales is persuading teams to adopt your tool. Analytics is tracking what’s used, misunderstood, or quietly broken. A reliable product isn’t enough. It also needs clear docs, helpful guidance, and education to drive adoption.

That’s the mindset that product thinking brings.

Thinking this way opens up the playbook used by real product teams. You start considering switching costs, user experience, and what it takes to drive adoption. You shift from shipping features to delivering value. Internal tooling becomes a portfolio of product offerings, each with its own purpose, audience, and support model.

And at the center of it all is the customer. The value you offer is not just the tool, but the space it creates. Space to move faster. Space to make better decisions. Space to focus on their own work and build great things.

Bread alone doesn’t build a bakery. Tools alone don’t build trust. Like a bakery, your success depends on more than what you make. It depends on the value you deliver to the people you serve. That’s what product thinking is for.