Products and tools are much like the hands and gloves on a cold winter day one cannot exist without the existence of the other, and they always go together.
The interdependence of products and tools
Tools and techniques are the raw materials for a product to take shape. Products are basically the requirement from a buyer wherein a seller produces it using appropriate tools. The finished products are then sold at a cost to a buyer. There might be a post-sale support contract associated with the sold products at an additional cost. The support again is provided by using supporting tools, for example, ticketing tools, debugging tool, databases, etc. All the tools are always aligned to the products that are being sold or built. Tools such as coding language, testing environment, servers, etc. are used in building a product. A product might not be sold in market, they can also be built as a support tool in order to produce the actual product; this is termed as supporting sub product.
How products and tools work
Main products can be partially used for producing other products such as an operating system. For instance, Microsoft is the main product, utilizing which more products are built such as the Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and so on. A main product can be a foundation to building a new sub product or another main product.
Products built can be used further as supporting platforms for many services and support. A support team is established upon training them on the required tools and processes. Every support staff must be made familiar with the products that they will be supporting as part of their jobs. There are different levels of support when it comes to supporting a product in a firm. Product knowledge is as important as knowing about their respective tools to support a product. Different levels of support staff will be trained at different levels based on the skill set they have been pre-hired for. Depending upon the same, levels of support contracts are sold along with the products.
A new concept of software as a service is in trend in the market nowadays. It simply means that the software has its own solutions built within. Submitting an error report or running a software in debug mode fixes certain possible issues by itself. This is one of the smartest way of building a software with a complete solution.