Product Axes

Every product is a bundle of dimensions.

Most people don't think about it this way, but it's true. At the center of every product is a core value proposition. Something fundamental that the customer actually wants. Surrounding that core is a set of axes that define how the product delivers it: accessibility, cost, choice, duration, format, personalization, trust. The core is the what. The axes are the how. And the how determines almost everything about who uses it, how often, and how much they'll pay.

Take entertainment. Entertainment is one of the oldest core value propositions in human civilization. People want to be transported, engaged, distracted, moved. That hasn't changed in thousands of years. What has changed, constantly, is the product's position along the axes that surround it.

A movie theater sits at a very specific point in this space. High production value, but low accessibility (you drive there, at a specific time, to a specific location). Limited choice (whatever's showing that week). High cost (fifteen bucks plus popcorn). Fixed duration (two hours, once). Strong social experience (big screen, shared audience, dark room). Those axes define the product. The movie is just the content. The experience of consuming it is shaped entirely by where the product sits along each of those dimensions.

And here's what's interesting: other entertainment products sit at completely different points along the same axes. A book is maximally accessible, infinitely durable, deeply personalized in pacing, but has zero production value compared to a film. A TikTok feed is instant, free, algorithmically personalized, and available anywhere, but each unit of content lasts fifteen seconds. A podcast is long-form, portable, free, and fits into dead time that no other entertainment product can reach. Each of these is the same fundamental product, entertainment, expressed at different coordinates along the same set of axes. They're not competing with each other on the core value. They're competing on the wrapper.

Blockbuster understood this, even if they never would have described it in these terms. They looked at the movie theater and said: we can shift the filmed entertainment product along two axes without changing the core value. We can make it more accessible (bring it to your neighborhood instead of downtown) and we can massively expand choice (hundreds of titles across every genre, available whenever you want). The core product stayed exactly the same. They just moved it along the axes that constrain how people access it.

And it worked. Obviously. Because the core product market fit was already proven. People like watching movies. That was never the question. The question was always about the wrapper.

You don't need to reprove the core

This is the thing that I think most people, founders especially, get wrong about disruption. The Christensen framing is great, and the idea of targeting underserved segments and moving upmarket is useful. But there's a simpler insight underneath it that I think is more actionable.

You almost never need to reprove product market fit from scratch. The core value at the heart of most products is ancient and stable. People want to be entertained. People want to be healthy. People want to learn things. People want to get from point A to point B. These are not hypotheses. These are facts about human beings that have been true for thousands of years.

What changes, what creates massive market shifts, is not the core value proposition. It's the position of the product along the axes that surround it. The wrapper. The delivery mechanism. The constraints that determine who can access the core value, when, how often, and at what cost.

Blockbuster didn't invent entertainment. Netflix didn't invent entertainment. They each took the same core product and shifted it along the axes of accessibility, choice, durability, and cost. The magnitude of each shift determined the magnitude of the market capture.

But here's the caveat, and it's important: you still need to prove you actually exist at the new coordinates. Saying "we shifted the product along the accessibility axis" is not the same as demonstrating that customers experience the product at that new position and value it there. The core product market fit is proven. The axis shift is your hypothesis. You need an anchor point, some piece of evidence, that the product actually works at the new coordinates and that customers respond to it.

Netflix's anchor was the mail-order DVD. Before they ever launched streaming, they proved that people would choose movies from home, accept a different delivery mechanism, and pay a subscription instead of per-rental. That was the proof point. The shift to streaming was a larger move along the same axis, but they'd already demonstrated the product worked at a position meaningfully different from Blockbuster. Uber's anchor was San Francisco. Before they were a global platform, they proved in a single city that people would summon a car from their phone and pay through an app. The core transportation product was proven. The axis shift needed a proof point. One city was enough.

You don't reprove the core. But you do need to anchor the shift.

Axes as principal components

Think of it like principal component analysis if you're into that sort of thing. Every product exists in a high-dimensional space defined by all the axes along which it could vary. Accessibility. Cost. Convenience. Personalization. Durability. Speed. Breadth. Depth. Social proof. Trust.

Most of these axes don't matter much for any given product. A few of them explain almost all of the variance in how customers experience value. Those are your principal components. Those are the axes that matter.

Blockbuster's principal components were accessibility and choice. Cost mattered, but it was secondary. Social experience mattered even less. If you plotted Blockbuster relative to a movie theater along every possible axis, the two biggest shifts were: you can get to it more easily, and you can watch whatever you want.

Netflix streaming, plotted against Blockbuster, shifted along the same principal components but at a dramatically larger magnitude. Accessibility went from "drive to a store in your neighborhood" to "press a button on your couch." Choice went from "hundreds of titles in stock" to "thousands of titles, always available." And a new axis activated: durability. You could watch something, stop halfway through, come back tomorrow. The content persisted. The experience was no longer a single transaction.

The magnitude of the shift along each axis determined the magnitude of the market expansion. Blockbuster was bigger than movie theaters. Netflix streaming was bigger than Blockbuster. Same core product. Bigger moves along the axes that mattered.

Magnitude determines market capture

This is the part that matters most if you're building something.

Small shifts along a product's principal axes produce incremental improvements. Your customers are a little happier. Your retention goes up a few points. That's nice. That's sustaining innovation in the Christensen sense. You're making the existing product slightly better for existing customers.

Large shifts along a product's principal axes produce market transformations. You don't just serve your existing customers better. You serve entirely new populations who were previously locked out by the old product's position along those axes. Your TAM expands because the constraint that was keeping people out just got removed.

Uber is a textbook example. Urban transportation has existed forever. Taxis are not a new concept. The core value, getting from point A to point B in a car, was thoroughly proven. Uber didn't touch the core. They shifted the product along three axes simultaneously: accessibility (request from anywhere via your phone), cost transparency (you know what you'll pay before you get in), and trust (ratings, driver info, GPS tracking). Each shift was large enough to activate new demand from people who rarely or never used taxis.

Spotify did the same thing to music. The core product, listening to recorded music, has been proven since the phonograph. Spotify shifted it along accessibility (any song, anywhere, any device), cost (ten bucks a month for everything versus fifteen bucks per album), and personalization (the system learns what you like and shows you more of it). The magnitude of the accessibility shift alone, from "buy individual albums" to "stream anything instantly," was enough to restructure the entire music industry.

Square did it with payments. Accepting credit card payments was proven. The axes that constrained it were cost (traditional merchant terminals were expensive), accessibility (you needed a physical terminal and a merchant account), and complexity (the setup process was brutal for small businesses). Square shifted all three at significant magnitude. Suddenly anyone with a phone could accept payments. The TAM went from "established businesses with storefronts" to "literally anyone who sells anything."

How to use this

Here's the thing. If you've been working in a space long enough, you probably already think this way. You just might not have this specific language for it. The best founders I've seen don't sit down and draw axis diagrams. They have an intuitive, almost physical sense of where the highest-value unlocks are in their market. They can feel which constraints are binding and which ones are noise. They've lived inside the problem long enough that the principal components are obvious to them, even if they'd never use that phrase.

From the venture side, this is basically what pattern recognition looks like when a founder walks into the room and immediately stands out. They aren't pitching a feature list. They aren't describing a technology. They're describing a shift. They know exactly which axis they're moving, they know why it's been stuck, and they know what changes when it moves. That clarity is the thing that separates a founder who understands their market from one who's built something clever but can't articulate why it matters. The problem statement, the solution, the market size, the wedge, it all falls out of this naturally if you understand your axes. Product axes are essentially the problem statement with a more structured framework behind it.

If you're more of an engineer or a technical founder and this kind of thinking doesn't come as naturally, this framework can help you back into it. Because product axes do a few very practical things.

First, they isolate the problem-solution pairing. Instead of describing your product as a collection of features, you can describe it as a shift along one or two axes that matter. "We moved the healthcare product from episodic to continuous along the accessibility axis" is a cleaner and more fundable statement than a slide full of feature bullets. Investors hear the first version and immediately understand the magnitude of what you're building. They hear the second version and start checking their email.

Second, they declutter your value proposition for sales and marketing. Most startups try to communicate too many things at once. They're cheaper and faster and more personalized and easier to use and better integrated and on and on. Product axes force you to identify the one or two dimensions where you're making a large enough shift to actually matter, and lead with those. Everything else is supporting detail. Your landing page, your sales deck, your cold outreach, all of it gets sharper when you know which axes are doing the work.

Third, they give you a framework for saying no. If a feature request or a partnership opportunity or a new market segment doesn't sit along your principal axes, it's a distraction. It might be a good idea in isolation. It might even make some customers happy. But if it doesn't move you further along the axes that define your product's value, it's pulling resources away from the shift that matters.

Map the axes. Figure out which ones explain the most variance in customer experience. Ignore the rest. You don't need to be better along every dimension. You need to be dramatically better along the one or two that matter most. The magnitude of your shift determines the magnitude of your outcome.

The trap: shifting the wrong axis

The inverse of this framework is also true, and it's where most products fail.

If you shift along an axis that is not a principal component, nothing happens. You've made the product different, but not different in a way that unlocks new value or new customers. You've built a feature nobody asked for. This is the most common failure mode in product development: working hard on axes that don't explain variance.

A movie theater that makes its seats slightly more comfortable is shifting along an axis that matters, but at insufficient magnitude. A movie theater that adds a restaurant is shifting along an axis (dining) that is not a principal component of the entertainment product. It might be a nice amenity. It won't restructure the market.

The other trap is shifting at insufficient magnitude. If Netflix had launched as a slightly cheaper Blockbuster with a slightly bigger catalog, it would have been a marginal competitor, not a market creator. The shift has to be large enough to change who can access the product. Incremental improvements along the right axis produce incrementally better businesses. Step-function improvements along the right axis produce new markets.

The third trap: axes that don't move

There's a trap that's worse than shifting the wrong axis or shifting at insufficient magnitude. It's attempting to shift an axis that is structurally immovable, and not realizing it until you've burned years and millions of dollars trying.

Some axes are locked in place by physics, regulation, biology, network effects, or deeply embedded market structure. They look like they should be movable. You can imagine the product at a new position along them. You can pitch a deck describing what it would look like. But when you actually try to build it, the axis doesn't budge, because something fundamental about the market or the technology prevents it from moving.

This is where I hold a pretty contrarian view on team building. The startup world worships optimism, creativity, and first-principles thinking. And those things matter. But the ability to look at an axis and know that it won't move, that some specific facet of the market or the technology or the regulatory environment makes this particular shift impossible right now, that ability almost exclusively comes from experience.

Someone who has spent years inside a specific industry knows which axes are frozen. They know which ones have been attempted before and why they failed. They know where the regulatory walls are, where the technical constraints bind, and where the market structure makes certain shifts economically impossible regardless of how good your product is. That pattern recognition is enormously valuable, because it saves you from spending your finite resources pushing on something that will not move.

I prefer to hire experienced people for this reason. I love optimism. I love builders who think from first principles. But a team full of first-principles thinkers with no domain experience will spend six months discovering that an axis is locked in place by a constraint they could have identified in week one if someone on the team had seen it before. The best teams combine creative ambition about where to shift with hard-earned knowledge about what can and cannot be shifted. You want the person who says "we should move the product here" sitting next to the person who says "here's exactly what's going to try to stop us, and here's how we get around it."

Knowing which axes are movable is at least as important as knowing which ones matter.

This is how you think about healthcare

Healthcare is a product. The core value proposition, helping people get and stay healthy, is as proven as anything in human civilization. Nobody needs to validate that people want to be healthy. The constraint is not demand. The constraint is the position of the current product along its principal axes.

Accessibility: you need an appointment, during business hours, at a specific location, weeks from now. Continuity: every visit resets. The doctor doesn't know your history. Your data doesn't follow you. Nothing compounds. Cost: unpredictable, opaque, often catastrophic. Personalization: your treatment is based on population-level guidelines, not your specific situation.

Those are the principal components. Those are the axes that explain almost all of the variance in how patients experience the healthcare product. And the current system sits at a terrible position along every single one of them.

You don't need to reprove that people want to be healthy. You need to move the product along the axes that are keeping people from getting the care they need. The magnitude of the shift determines the magnitude of the market you create.