I had an epiphany today. For months I have been saying that I am building a product. That sounded tidy and manageable. A product has a set of features, a roadmap, a launch date. Then it hit me. I am not just building a product. I am building a company.
That shift matters. A product lives on a shelf, even if that shelf is a cloud. A company is a living system. It thinks, it learns, it makes promises, it keeps them or it does not. When I saw the whole, my decisions changed. I stopped asking only what the next feature should be. I started asking what kind of organization produces value day after day, and gets better while doing it.
When I saw the company as the product, silos stopped making sense. Waiting for one group to finish so the next can start is a tax on momentum. I began to see the work as one ecosystem that shares a schedule and a sprint rhythm. Engineering, marketing, customer support, conversations, sales, finance, operations, all of it moves together. We are not tossing tickets over a wall. We are improving the same organism.
This is not a metaphor for clever slides. It is a practical way to work. The weekly or biweekly sprint becomes the pace at which the entire company learns. The backlog is no longer just a list for developers. It is a queue of experiments and improvements across the business. Update the onboarding flow. Clarify the message on the landing pages. Fix the clumsy internal handoff that frustrates a customer. Write the guide that would have saved you an hour last week. These are all product changes when the company is the product.
Treating the company as the product also forces honesty. If I will not use our own system to run our work, then it is not ready. If a process confuses me, it will confuse a customer. If a message is vague inside the walls, it will be vague outside the walls. The friction I feel is the same friction others will feel. Instead of explaining it away, I can surface it, fix it, and move on a little wiser.
There is a rallying effect here. People can gather around a product vision, yes, but they can gather even more around a vision for how we operate. Excellence shifts from a slogan to a habit. Remove a step. Reduce confusion. Capture what you learned and make it easy for the next person to apply. Celebrate a win, then ask and then repeat it. Find the weak spot in the system and strengthen it without drama. When the company is the product, improvement becomes daily practice.
This mindset invites a simple cadence. Decide what outcomes matter this sprint. Do the work with focus. Review the results without defensiveness. Keep what worked. Change what did not. Then do it again. Over time the organism gets stronger. The systems get clearer. The experience for customers becomes smoother and more trustworthy. The work feels lighter because it is aligned.
I still care about the software of course. I care even more about the business that makes and supports it. The software will ship features. The company will ship reliability, clarity, and a sense that someone thought this through. That is the promise I want to make, and the only way I know to keep it is to treat the company itself as the product that we are building.
Today I choose that mindset. Fewer walls. Shared rhythm. Continuous improvement across every part of the house. Build the product, yes, and build the company that can keep building long after the first burst of energy fades. That is the work worth doing.
company culture matters!
Here’s a related article – https://www.meridian-ai.com/blog/company-culture-business-strategy-founders
Thanks!