Whole Product
Tesla DEBTA “whole product” is the complete set of products and services required to ensure your target customers have a compelling reason to buy your solution. It fully addresses their needs by combining the core product with all necessary additional components.
For example, a smartphone is only a whole product if it includes not just the hardware, but also wireless connectivity, apps, and support services that make it “smart” , functional and valuable to you. The hardware alone is just part of the solution. It’s easy to take this for granted, but it’s crucial to consider the entire ecosystem that makes your product truly complete.
In a trivial B2C example, when you sell a new battery-operated toy, you might include the batteries with it, so a child can use and enjoy it on opening.
(Imagine the incomplete product of a toy gift and the child opening it and then asking the parent to find batteries, them scrambling around the house only to find they don’t have the right size of battery and the child ending up screaming in frustration 😫)
In a vital B2C example, for Tesla, the battery became such an essential and integral part of their whole product that it became a 
CORE part of their offering.
(Tesla then in turn became Dependent—as in the D of 
DEBT
—on the constituent parts of their batteries, such as Lithium, a scarce raw material.)
Now EVs in general are becoming dependent on charging infrastructure.
As at the time of writing this, consumers are finding hybrids increasingly appealing because of the lack of charging infrastructure and the planning and time required to charge on a journey.
Don’t underestimate the importance of your whole product. It might incorporate many things you could easily overlook such as:
- Data needed to run your AI/ML algorithm for learning and training
- Workflows that incorporate other people’s services such as verification and sign on
- Compliance such as KYC of SOC2 for certain products or industries
- And of course feature/functionality such as capabilities that are someone else’s CORE strength
Exercise
Tesla is a great example of a company with a lot of DEBT. What can you see might be their
- Dependencies?
- External factors?
- Barriers to entry, backlash and burden as they have scaled?
- Timing issues?
Consider these and brainstorm what you can see. Then look for some pointers here:
See the Wikipedia definition of whole product here
. It’s an adaptation of the total product concept developed by Ted Levitt
, a professor at Harvard Business School, and expanded on by Geoffrey Moore.
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
The first DEBT concept is the whole product: almost every product, on its own, is not the whole solution the customer needs. We used the smartphone to make the point: what do you need to make it useful? Apps, and a network. Without a carrier and without apps it’s absolutely useless (though the phone function itself is one built-in app). Look at nearly any product and you’ll find aspects that must be supplied by others before it becomes a complete, usable solution for the customer.
So the first thing to get clear is how your product actually fits into the customer’s overall solution, and what else has to be true around it. Once you accept that your product is only part of the whole, you can identify the gaps and decide how to fill them (through partners, an ecosystem, or additional pieces you build), so that the customer experiences a solution that works end to end rather than a component that leaves them stranded.