Should We Build Products or Create Solutions?
Why do great products lose to integrated solutions? This essay explores the shift from product thinking to solution thinking in enterprise technology.
Editor's Note: This essay was originally published on LinkedIn in March 2016. Looking back, I can see the beginnings of a question that still shapes my thinking today: *Do customers buy products, or do they buy outcomes?*. It has been lightly edited for clarity, formatting, and readability while preserving the original ideas and intent.
One question has stayed with me throughout my career: are we building products, or are we creating solutions?
When I look across industries, I see a common pattern. Companies that were once regarded as specialists in a particular domain are increasingly losing ground to organizations whose primary strength lies elsewhere, but who bundle similar capabilities into a broader solution.
Take Business Continuity as an example.
Much of the market eventually came to be dominated by companies like Microsoft and VMware. Meanwhile, vendors whose core expertise was business continuity found themselves serving niche markets, focusing on specific geographies, or being acquired by larger players.
This shift wasn’t simply about building better products.
It was about changing the way solutions were sold.
Customers rarely wake up wanting to solve a single isolated problem. They want a solution that addresses the majority of their challenges while reducing complexity.
The Pareto Principle appears here as well.
A CIO or CTO may only have time for a single meeting. In that meeting, they are looking for a solution that addresses 80% of their data center challenges, not another standalone product that solves one specific problem exceptionally well.
This pattern extends well beyond enterprise infrastructure. Retail, insurance, healthcare, and many other industries have followed similar trajectories.
The question for every organization then becomes:
Are we optimizing individual products, or are we building solutions that solve customer problems end to end?
This has implications far beyond engineering.
Product, sales, marketing, and strategy teams need to think in terms of solution portfolios rather than individual offerings.
Getting a foot in the door is no longer enough if the customer ultimately has to assemble the complete solution themselves.
The companies that succeed will be those that make complexity disappear.
Originally published on LinkedIn in March 2016. Republished on abhisekchaudhuri.com as part of the Collected Essays.
