What is a Product in Pathmode?
A Product in Pathmode is the thing you are improving. Onboarding. Checkout. The mobile app. An internal admin tool. Anything with users, friction, and a team that can change it.
Each Product holds its own three surfaces:
- Evidence — the friction signals, quotes, observations, metrics, and requests gathered for that surface
- Intents — the specs written from that evidence
- Build Queue — the intents that are ready or in flight
Products are the level where the unit of work makes sense. Above them is the Workspace (the team and account). Below them are the intents themselves.
Why a separate scope
Most product tools either flatten everything into one global backlog or fragment it across rigid hierarchies — team, epic, story, task. Both miss the actual unit: the surface you're trying to change.
A Product gives evidence and intent a home. The friction users hit during onboarding belongs to the Onboarding product. The specs that fix that friction live there too. You don't have to fish through a global backlog to find what's relevant — and AI agents working against the evidence don't have to either.
Products vs. teams, epics, surfaces
A Product is not a team — a team can own multiple products. A Product is not an epic — epics are time-bound; products persist. A Product is closer to what some organizations call a "surface" or "domain," but with a fixed boundary so evidence and intents can be scoped, queried, and exported cleanly.
If your team already uses "product area" or "domain" loosely, a Pathmode Product is the formal version of that: a named container with its own evidence stream, spec history, and build queue.
When to create a new Product
Create a Product when the surface has:
- Its own users or modes of use — onboarding has different friction than billing
- A team or owner who can act on it — a product no one can change is research, not work
- Distinct evidence and intents — if you'd never write a spec that touches both, they belong in separate Products
Don't create a Product per feature. Features live as intents inside a Product. The Product is the durable scope; intents come and go.