The Pulse of Productization
A collection of news, insights, and product leaders we admire
“There was this assumption that we could just hand the new product over to the sales team and they will sell it because ‘it's new, it'll be exciting!’ That's not the way it worked.
Innovation. Productization. Tech-Enablement. Digitization. AI.
The CEO of a global HR advisory firm recently told me,
“It is the wild, wild west right now. But I know, with certainty, AI will be a revolutionary change, not an evolutionary change, for professional services firms. This will be a huge change management challenge as we rethink almost everything - how we create value, who we hire, how we make money - really, everything.”
Speaking Frankly - It’s Hard Being a Product Leader in a New-to-Product Organization
A few weeks ago I was speaking with a prospective client who had recently sold his consulting firm to a larger, global firm. He wanted help persuading the parent company to invest in growing a niche SaaS product that his team created. He was frustrated by the parent company’s inability to understand why it would be useful to supplement their consulting services with this SaaS product. At one point in the conversation, I asked him to drop a hyperlink into the chat. He said, “I don’t know how to do that.”
One CEO recently shared with me, “We need to restructure our incentive plan. Our consultants are all incented on short-term revenue, which is making it very hard to get traction with our new products that have lower price points but better margins and more revenue visibility.”
Whom to hire—and when to hire them—to score big product wins.
To play at a high level, these companies have to undergo significant organizational transformation.
Services Firms don’t need to become product-led organizations. They do need to become product friendly.
