What Do I Really Mean by "Product"?
Moving Beyond the Workhorse
An entrepreneur but still a developer at heart with a creative spirit. I have a passion for building things that solve real problems for real people. At Gemba - We improve the working lives of the people who make a difference.
"Product" is an overloaded term. In our day-to-day, when I say our teams need to adopt "product thinking" or be "product-focused," it can mean a dozen different things.
To clarify my meaning and to provide a common framework I turn to a trusty 2x2 matrix for defining and evaluating our products. The Y axis is around utility where the X axis is about emotion.
Generated by Nano Banana
Over my career, I've built products that fit into every quadrant. Regrettably, I haven't built as many Loved Products as I would like. I think it is actually quite rare to deliver a product that you are truly proud of.
The type of products we build
We mostly build bespoke digital products for internal users in government organisations. These aren’t mass-market tools. They’re designed to support specific teams, operating within particular constraints, to do very particular jobs.
That context matters, because it shapes the kind of products we build — and the risks we have to manage.
Products like this tend to share a few characteristics:
A relatively small user base - We might be serving dozens of users, or we might be serving thousands but we’re rarely building something intended for millions of people.
A captive audience - Internal users usually can’t choose an alternative. They can’t switch tools, churn, or vote with their feet. What we build is what they have to use.
No real competition - It’s extremely rare for an organisation to fund multiple teams to solve the same internal problem. There are no market forces at play, no competing products, and no natural pressure to improve through rivalry.
Together, these factors make it surprisingly easy to build products that are useful but unloved.
They work. They do the job. But they have a long way to go in terms of UX.
If we’re not careful, this context quietly pulls us away from the top-right corner products that are both highly useful and genuinely liked and towards tools that people tolerate rather than value.
The Quadrants of Product
Ideally, we want to push all our products into the Top-Right quadrant (Highly useful, Highly Liked). However, I’ve learned over time that for the types of products we build, Usefulness (Utility) is, by far, the most critical axis. Our first and most important priority must be to move products up.
Below the Middle Line (Not useful): Anything that falls here, products that are not useful, has no place in our business. Our vision is to Improve the Working lives of the people who make a difference. We cannot achieve that with tools that are fundamentally not useful.
The Workhorse (Useful but not overly liked): This is the high-risk zone for internal products. We build highly useful, functional tools, but we often fail to invest in the user experience or likability to the extent is actually creates joy for users.
The Workhorse Trap
In the consumer world, the market solves the "Workhorse" problem: If you build a useful product that no one likes to use, a competitor will perfect the user experience and steal your lunch.
The challenge is much harder when building internal tools for Government clients. Without these external market forces and actual competition, it is too common for our products to get stuck as Workhorses. It becomes difficult to justify refining the user experience when a team could be building another essential, high utility tool.
To push a Workhorse toward the Loved Product quadrant, we need to internalise the market pressure. We must bring our own:
Challenge Function: Questioning why a product is merely functional and not delightful.
Quality Bars: Setting standards for user experience that rival consumer-grade software.
Passion and Energy: The conviction to invest in refining a product that is already "good enough" for someone's day job.
If we can build more products we are truly proud of, that measurably improve people's working lives, moving from necessary Workhorses to indispensable - Loved Products - that would be a truly great thing.
Key Takeaways
Fight for Utility: If you are building something below the middle line (not useful), challenge and fight until you find a solution that actually solves users' problems and improves someone's working life.
Up Before Right: If time or budget is tight, moving up (improving utility) is more important than moving right (improving likability), especially in the world we operate in.
Avoid the Workhorse Trap: To skip the Workhorse trap entirely, think about likability and user experience as early as possible. A large amount of discovery and experimentation at the start can ensure you build a Loved Product from day one. Test with a small pilot group before rolling out wider.
Bring the Energy: If you have an existing Workhorse product, you need to be the source of passion and energy to push it toward the right. Since market forces aren't driving this change, you have to bring that drive yourself.
