Chemistry is essential to modern life. From home and personal care chemical products, to clothing and sports equipment, to automobiles and electronics, chemistry helps make possible thousands of products we rely on every day. And chemistry provides a range of important benefits in these products – thanks to innovations in chemistry, automobiles can be manufactured to be light weight and more fuel efficient, building materials are more durable and resilient, and electronics like cell phones, computers and televisions have enhanced functionality to meet the technology needs of today’s consumers.

Products are the species formed from chemical products reactions.[1] During a chemical reaction, reactants are transformed into products after passing through a high energy transition state. This process results in the consumption of the reactants. It can be a spontaneous reaction or mediated by catalysts which lower the energy of the transition state, and by solvents which provide the chemical products environment necessary for the reaction to take place. When represented in chemical equations, products are by convention drawn on the right-hand side, even in the case of reversible reactions.[2] The properties of products such as their energies help determine several characteristics of a chemical reaction, such as whether the reaction is exergonic or endergonic. Additionally, the properties of a product can make it easier to extract and purify following a chemical reaction, especially if the product has a different state of matter than the reactants.
Much of chemistry research is focused on the synthesis and characterization of beneficial products, as well as the detection and removal of undesirable products. Synthetic chemists can be subdivided into research chemists who design new chemicals and pioneer new methods for synthesizing chemicals, as well as process chemists who scale up chemical products and make it safer, more environmentally sustainable, and more efficient.[3] Other fields include natural product chemists who isolate products created by living organisms and then characterize and study these products.
The chemical products reaction influence several aspects of the reaction. If the products are lower in energy than the reactants, then the reaction will give off excess energy making it an exergonic reaction. Such reactions are thermodynamically favorable and tend to happen on their own. If the kinetics of the reaction are high enough, however, then the reaction may occur too slowly to be observed, or not even occur at all. This is the case with the conversion of diamond to lower energy graphite at atmospheric pressure, in such a reaction diamond is considered metastable and will not be observed converting into graphite.[4][5]

If the products are higher in chemical products energy than the reactants then the reaction will require energy to be performed and is therefore an endergonic reaction. Additionally if the product is less stable than a reactant, then Leffler's assumption holds that the transition state will more closely resemble the product than the reactant.[6] Sometimes the product will differ significantly enough from the reactant that it is easily purified following the reaction such as when a product is insoluble and precipitates out of solution while the reactants remained dissolved.