A “whole product” is everything required in your product to ensure your target customers have a compelling reason to buy your solution. It’s what enables the product to fully address their need. For example your smart phone is only a whole product if it has wireless connectivity and Apps to make it smart. The phone hardware itself is just part of the solution. It’s easy to take this for granted, but important not to do so!
In a trivial B2C example, when you sell a new battery-operated toy, you might include the batteries with it, so a child can use and enjoy it on opening.
(Imagine the incomplete product of a toy gift and the child opening it and then asking the parent to find batteries, them scrambling around the house only to find they don’t have the right size of battery and the child ending up screaming in frustration 😫)
In a vital B2C example, for Tesla, the battery became such an essential and integral part of their whole product that it became a