#10 - Fluid products

Much of my career has unfolded at the intersection of emerging technology, business strategy and product. And mostly, the job was about creating clarity: choose your perspective on what comes next. Focus on needs. Define the edges of what gets shipped. In a resource-constrained environment, focus and clarity offered the fastest path to value.

But that path is starting to give way to something looser and faster. With the rise of AI, the technical barriers to expanding product surface have never been lower. Companies are no longer bound by what their product and engineering teams can deliver. They're shipping more, with less friction and blurrier edges.

As a result, products are becoming fluid.

As agentic AI enters the mainstream, boundaries start to blur. Products stop being discrete objects. Rather, they are turning into dynamically orchestrated complex systems. Agents that adapt to evolving workflows. Hallucinating, stumbling and recovering. To the traditional mindset, they're unreliable. To me, they feel like living systems.

Fluidity demands a different path to value. Focus and control break down when products turn fluid and value emerges through interaction. Predictability and fixed interfaces can't hold their shape when the product keeps changing. Your moat no longer sits in doing one thing 10x better. It grows in adaptive ecosystems that evolve with your users.

This changes the foundation of product design and the nature of its supporting business models. In a world of fluid products and rapidly evolving systems, product design is no longer about control. It’s about cultivation. Like gardeners, we don’t dictate the outcome. We can only create the conditions for coherence to emerge. We guide loosely, offer the right affordances, and let users appropriate what they need.

Cultivate your ecosystem well to sustainably harvest the unpredictable outcomes it bears.