A product is the thing you are building. Not a folder and not a project plan - the thing itself, with a reason to exist that survives the tasks currently open under it.
The five questions
Every product carries five fields that exist to be answered in words, not filled in:
| Field | The question it answers |
|---|
| Problem | What is broken for someone today? |
| Audience | Who has that problem, specifically? |
| Value | What changes for them if this works? |
| Differentiation | Why this and not the obvious alternative? |
| Success | How will you know, in numbers? |
They are optional. Leaving them empty is a legitimate state and nothing nags you about it - but they are the first section an agent reads when it asks for a product's context, so a product that answers them gets better advice than one that does not.
Status is one axis, stage is another
Status is whether you are working on it: ACTIVE, PAUSED, ARCHIVED or SUNSET. Four values, and they mean what they say. Archiving is not deleting: an archived product keeps every task, decision and document it ever had, stops appearing in the places you scan daily, and can be restored whole.
Stage is where it is in its own life - discovery, validation, build, launch, operations. Stages are workspace data, not a fixed list, so you can name and order them the way your work actually goes. What is fixed is each stage's role, which is how the rest of the product reasons about it: a stage in the TERMINAL role means finished no matter what you called it.
Health is computed, never set
A product's health band - Healthy, Watch, Critical - is not a field you edit. It is derived, on every read, from things that are true: unresolved incidents, overdue work, gates that have been blocked for a while. Trying to write it is refused.
That is deliberate and it is a rule the whole product follows: a number you can edit is a number that will be edited to look good. Anything makermap computes, it also explains - open the health band and it names the incidents and the overdue items that produced it.
Deleting
delete_product is a soft delete: the product disappears from your lists and is recoverable with restore_product. Physically destroying it is purge_product, which is a separate, deliberate act - and one an agent principal may never perform, whatever its token allows.