Rational subsets of a monoid
The product is the monoid product. A monoid is a set equipped with an operation (which we can call product) satisfying certain axioms. The classical monoid we use in formal languages is $\Sigma^*$ (for some alphabet $\Sigma$), in which case the monoid product is indeed concatenation. But this is not the only possibility: for example, every group is a monoid, since the monoid axioms are a subset of the group axioms.