A Product Taxonomy for the Agentive Age

We're entering a new era. The old product rules don't apply.

Software is reorganizing around agents that act and humans that supervise. This is happening because the ROI is undeniable. One human doing the work of many. Faster, more reliable, less misalignment. The leverage is too large to ignore.

Products that move into this new era will win. Products that don't won't.

This is the landscape of the new world.

Products of Consequence

Where outcomes happen, agents act, and humans arbitrate. Contracts get signed, money moves, code ships, patients get treated, cases get filed.

These are the products where accountability lives. Someone answers for what happens. That accountability requires visibility, control, and the ability to intervene. The arbiter model governs these products: agents do the work, humans supervise the work, and humans remain responsible for outcomes.

If your product is where action happens, where real consequences flow from what the software does, this is you.

Products of Judgment

These feed Products of Consequence: data, signals, assessments, and decisioning. A Product of Judgment doesn't sign the contract or move the money. It informs the system that does.

Your output is someone else's input. That changes what matters. Accuracy is table stakes. Beyond that: confidence boundaries, so downstream systems know when to trust you and when to escalate. Transparent reasoning, so when something goes wrong, the Product of Consequence can trace it back. Latency: you're now on the critical path of agentic workflows, not human decision cycles.

If your product provides the information that Products of Consequence act on, this is you.

Products of Counsel

These advise humans directly: recommendations, guidance, expertise on demand.

The chat interface is a commodity. Anyone can build a chat UI. The moat is elsewhere. Proprietary data. Domain expertise encoded into the system. The reasoning patterns of a specialist made accessible to a generalist.

The other doctrine for Products of Counsel: facilitate the next step. Advice that doesn't connect to action is trivia. The value lies in bridging from insight to outcome, even if the outcome occurs elsewhere.

If your product helps humans make better decisions through conversation, this is you.

Products of Action

Infrastructure. Send the text. Process the payment. Store the file.

These products perform single, idempotent operations. One input, one output, done. They don't reason, they don't sequence, they don't have consequences of their own. They're the building blocks that Products of Consequence are built on.

A mortgage payment processor is a Product of Action. A mortgage broker application is a Product of Consequence. The difference is complexity. The moment you have multi-step workflows, judgment calls, places where things can go wrong and require intervention, you've crossed into consequence territory.

This doesn't mean Products of Action lack stakes. A payment processor that double-charges or fails compliance has real consequences. But the product itself isn't navigating those situations. It succeeds or fails. Products of Consequence navigate.

This category isn't new. The doctrine is the same as it's always been: do the thing, do it well, do it fast. No new rules required.

How They Connect

Judgment feeds Consequence. Your data, your signals, and your assessments become the inputs an agent acts on.

Counsel advises the human who arbitrates the consequence. The recommendation shapes the decision to approve, reject, or intervene.

Action is what Consequence orchestrates. The single operations that agents string together into workflows.

The categories aren't silos. They're roles in a system. Knowing your role means knowing who you serve and what they need from you.

One clarification: these categories aren't about what kind of company you are. They're about what role a given product plays in a given context. A payment processor is a Product of Action to the application that calls it. That same company's fraud platform is a Product of Consequence. Agents flag suspicious transactions, and humans decide to block or allow. The taxonomy describes roles, not companies.

Find Yourself

Every product fits somewhere in this landscape. If you have multiple products, they fit in different places. The question for each: what do customers pay you for, and where does that live?

If they pay you for outcomes, read the doctrine for Products of Consequence. If they pay you for information that feeds someone else's outcomes, read the doctrine for Products of Judgment. If they pay you for advice, read the doctrine for Products of Counsel. If they pay you for reliable execution of simple operations, keep doing what you're doing.

The era is changing. The products that understand their role in the new landscape will thrive. The ones that don't will wonder what happened.