An enterprise-class system designed to meet a specific business need and/or support a particular business process.

For business analysts, the term product is often synonymous with “system” or “enterprise system”.  This relatively recent shift in the language in the enterprise software development space is meant to promote more of a product-centric view of software-based systems.

This product-centric view encourages software teams to view the output of their efforts as a product that will be consumed by a customer. This encourages the product team to focus heavily on the overall experience that a customer is expected to have with the product instead of focusing solely on the technical design and implementation aspects of the system.

It’s important for business analysts to realize that the product is one of many parts of a holistic enterprise solution.  Without this realization, analysts are likely to neglect the business architecture and design aspects of the solution in exchange for simply delivering a product.