Offering
An offering is the full set of things a company builds and supplies: the app or product, the documentation, onboarding emails, customer support, third-party integrations, and marketing materials. It covers everything the team produces, not just what the product team ships.
Definition
The provider's complete affordance output. Everything the provider supplies into the affordance landscape, including the app, workflow, materials, support, and integrations the provider builds.
One component of the affordance landscape
The affordance landscape is the totality of intent-aligned affordances available to a user pursuing a sought state — every condition in the world that could advance their pursuit. The offering is one component of that landscape. It's what the provider has built and made available; the rest of the landscape exists outside provider control: third-party tools the provider hasn't incorporated, the user's existing tools and knowledge, substitute affordances the user reaches for when the provider's options fall short (pen-and-paper, Stack Overflow, search-engine answers, not-doing-it-at-all).
Most of the affordance landscape for any given pursuit sits outside the offering. Users assemble routes by hopscotching across whatever affordances they have reach of — provider-built, third-party, and user-external alike. The offering is one set of candidates among many; users pick what fits their step better, including things outside the offering when those serve the step better.
The path is a slice of the offering
The offering is the provider's full affordance output across all the intents the offering serves. The path is narrower: the provider's deliberate route-efficacious affordances for a specific intent — the slice of the offering shaped to support a particular pursuit.
An offering can hold multiple paths inside it, one per intent-cohort the provider routes for. The offering is the whole; the paths are intent-specific routings through it.
The offering as vehicle
The offering is a vehicle for the user's pursuit. Every interaction with the offering is the user going through it toward something they're trying to accomplish — the user's destination lives outside the offering. The user's activity produces value, and the offering supports that production rather than constituting it.
Example
Stripe's offering includes its API, dashboard, documentation, customer support, fraud detection, and the integrations Stripe has built with payment networks and banking partners. It does not include the developer's existing codebase, Stack Overflow answers about Stripe usage, third-party libraries written on top of Stripe by other developers, or the engineering team's prior experience with payment systems. Those are in the affordance landscape for a developer accepting payments, but outside Stripe's offering.