The Age of Projucts

Yesterday, Vogue Business reported the reinvention of Vaseline, a 155-year-old petroleum-jelly brand that people bought mostly from habit. The company found more than 3.5 million social posts showing people using Vaseline in ways it had never intended. Instead of advertising around them, it set about testing them – validating some, debunking others, tracking down the customers who’d invented the best ones and »co-authoring« new products with them. The gamble paid off: three straight years of double-digit growth, a place among Unilever’s core 30 »Power Brands«, and 14 Lions won at the festival of creativity in Cannes.¹

»The product is no longer the answer. It’s the question«

Vogue considers this a heritage brand learning to speak the language of the Internet, but there’s something else here. The company puts something into the world, watches what people do with it, and then changes the thing itself in response. Provide, observe, change, provide again.

Most of the industrial era wasn’t about provision, but about prediction. Product development ran the other way: predict what people want, design it, manufacture it, sell it. Companies built enormous research operations – forecasters, focus groups, consultants – to know the future before committing to a product.

I sat in on some of those focus groups, and can confirm it can be confusing to listen to a bunch of Grade D consumers – »semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers«, in the researchers’ unforgiving jargon – in the English town of Slough discuss what they want from a new product. Ask customers what they want and they’ll tell you what they think they want; watch a hundred million people use something and you may discover what they didn’t know to ask for. Four decades ago, futurist writer Alvin Toffler already had a name for the person doing both jobs at once: the »prosumer« – producer and consumer folded into one.²

Economist Eric von Hippel showed that some of the most important product improvements don’t come from a company’s own labs but from »lead users« who adapt a product to some challenge before anyone else faces that challenge.³ Vaseline’s customers ran uncontrolled experiments on petroleum jelly for years; now the company decided to treat the results as research.

Call the resulting object a »projuct« – a product that is also a project, thrown forward before its final form is settled.⁴ A prototype is unfinished because its maker hasn’t finished designing it. A projuct is unfinished on purpose: a gap left in the design for the world to fill in.

Software has lived in perpetual beta for years. Streaming and social platforms learn what to make and present from measuring what people watch or stop scrolling for. The more interesting version doesn’t just observe preference: it lets people develop the actual thing. No R&D department, however brilliant, can reproduce the sheer experimental diversity of a hundred million people misusing, reimagining, adapting, and breaking a product every day.

IKEA has long given customers furniture that gets hacked and repurposed by an entire subculture of unofficial inventors long after it leaves the factory.⁵ Marijn van der Poll’s Do Hit Chair makes the same logic almost comically literal: a block of steel and a sledgehammer, finish the design yourself.⁶ Architect Alejandro Aravena deliberately built only »half of a good house« – the expensive, structurally difficult half – and left the rest for residents to complete as their own means allowed.⁷ Petroleum jelly, poured concrete, and code: unfinishedness turns out to be a contemporary design decision available at almost any scale.

And the same pattern has become the defining feature of AI. A model’s makers know a great deal about how they built it, but considerably less about what millions of users will do with it. So the model ships, people find uses nobody anticipated, and the next version absorbs some of what was learned. The product is no longer the answer. It’s the question.

Leaving a little room on purpose is different from leaving things unfinished by accident. A finished product tells you what its maker already knows. A projuct leaves room for what the maker doesn’t know yet – which may be the more useful thing to be selling. That’s the shift underway: not the ability to innovate faster, but the ability to build things that discover their own future through use. We often think about our economy as one of innovation. Maybe the age of projucts will give us an economy of organised surprise.

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