“We can do that.”
I hear it constantly. Partner meetings, vendor calls, answers to RFPs. And in the narrow sense it’s usually true — any competent engineering team can build any single feature you name. What almost nobody can do is build all of them, run them in production, support them at three in the morning, and stay compliant in every country the customer operates in.
Theodore Levitt drew this in 1980, Regis McKenna renamed it the whole product, and Geoffrey Moore made it famous in Crossing the Chasm. The total product has four rings. The generic product is the thing you actually ship, and around it sit the expected, the augmented and the potential product — everything else the customer’s use case needs before any of it works. You build one ring. The other three come from somewhere, and if they don’t come from your ecosystem they come out of your customer’s budget and patience.
The clearest proof is the largest company in the room. Microsoft has more engineering capacity than anyone, and it still doesn’t attempt all four rings on its own — it runs an enormous partner ecosystem to put the complete product in front of a customer, development partners and service partners both. If that’s the conclusion you reach with those resources, the question was never whether you personally could build it.
None of this is new, by the way. ERP vendors learned it in the nineties: the license was the easy part, and the system integrators made the thing actually fit the business. Same shape, different decade.
So when someone tells you they can develop it, the question isn’t really whether they can. Which ring do they mean, and who’s doing the other three?