A product is an operating model
The product is what users see. The operating model is what makes it behave that way over time. Both are designed, or both drift.
Every product is two things at once. There is the product a user meets: the surfaces, the words, the response to a click. And there is the operating model that produces it: the boundaries between teams, the rituals around deploys, the policies deciding what gets reviewed and what ships on trust.
You can change the surface without touching the model, but the surface drifts back toward the shape the model wants to produce. This is why so many redesigns feel temporary: fresh paint on the same machine. Conway’s law is the sharp version of this, that a system’s structure ends up mirroring the organisation that built it, whether you meant it to or not.
To change a product durably, design both: the surface people touch, and the machine that keeps producing it.