Defining experience and using that as the basis to build great teams, products and companies.

What is a great product?

Defining a great product is probably as subjective as defining what is great art, we must succumb to saying to each his own However if we must still go on to describe this beast & force a definition, a great place to start would be by looking at the problem from eyes of arguably the product’s most important stakeholder: The user also widely known as the customer. Unlike marketers, designers, engineers, investors and other folks involved in making products, users don’t spend their lives thinking deeply and agonising over the details of the products/markets they deal with, they are laser-focused on getting the most out of a product in the least amount of time at the least possible cost. Sometimes rationally, mostly irrationally. Users typically don’t review products, they experience them. And what really sustains a product is delivering a great experience consistently, a product is an experience delivered over multiple diverse interactions.
Product = Sum of Experiences
According to Wikipedia, “customer experience has emerged as the single most important aspect in achieving success for companies in all industries” 
The basis of building great products is thus building great experiences for people who use them.

What is an experience?

An experience is not a single object or entity, it is an ensemble of them. Imagine eating in a restaurant, you experience is the sum of: the length of the waiting list, the ambience, the view from your table, the noise levels of your fellow diners, the sparkle (or lack of) of the cutlery, the tone and responsiveness of the waiters, the cleanliness of the toilets, your expectations of the restaurant and of course, the food. Reviewers (and now people on zomato) try to quantify all of those along different lines and rate restaurants along different dimensions but what you remember in the end is how it felt. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ― Maya Angelou Thats exactly how people experience products.
People remember vague details here and there: Crappy homepage, CEOs profile on LinkedIn looks HOT, support peeps were quite helpful, … all people are left with  .. are feelings.
Extending the concept of an ensemble into product
Product (externally) = Emotion in interaction 1  + Emotion in interaction 2 + Emotion in interaction 3 + …
Product (internally) = Design + copy + price + speed + reliability + support + tone + Branding + perception + nature of competition Takes a lot to get a product right, a lot of things have to be right for nothing in your experience to go wrong. However, most of us in possess a very singular view of what defines a great product. Design-loving folks look at usability and aesthetics.
Terminal hackers look at extensibility of code & scalability 
And so on. X folks think the product rocks but Y folks say the product sucks, who’s right? Both! They’re speaking from different but deeply intertwined dimensions of a product.
So how do we use that definition to make great products? So far line our of thinking is thus ..
Products are a collection of experiences.
Delivering great product experiences depends on getting a diverse set of factors right.
So how do we make a multitude of factors amazing?
Well you can’t get em all right, so pick the top 3-5-7 and get em awesome.
But how can a product be awesome at a diverse set of things?
Products are shaped by diverse factors but each factor is controlled by a different team or person.
Thus the problem of getting diverse parts of the experience boils down to getting people diverse awesome to work on different parts of your product. Good people who each bring excellent parts of the sandwich can come together to deliver an excellent sandwich.  This is manifested in the “gene pool engineering” that Khosla Ventures does, watch this video from 10:10 and/or read about it here.
So bring a great engineer and a great marketer and you’re done 
.. not quite.
Doing the above just reduces risk and covers your bases. You’re preventing your team from becoming a circle jerking band of yes-men.
There’s still the most fun part, execution. 
A whole new story and a whole new blog post.