Product conformity is the state of meeting all applicable requirements for a product and is directly related to product liability.
Requirements may arise from legal regulations, customer conditions, industry norms or the organization’s own commitments.
Difference from safety
Product safety focuses on the absence of unacceptable risk. Product conformity is broader: even if the product is entirely safe, there is a conformity problem if it fails to meet a regulatory condition, a customer requirement or a marking obligation.
One of the improvements brought by the VDA Product Compliance Volume 2 guideline published in July 2026 is a clearer separation of the tasks belonging to these two areas.
The weakness in practice
Many organizations gather safety and conformity under a single checklist and leave the conformity side incomplete. The check question is: you have records showing your product is safe; do you have a separate set of records showing it meets all applicable legal and customer requirements?
Separating safety and conformity tasks and the documentation expectations are practised in the PSCR training. For the system-side counterpart, see the IATF 16949 training.