In Productization, Speed Wins

"We spent 18 months perfecting the offer. By the time we launched, a competitor had beat us to market—with a worse product—but they now own the space."

— CEO, Training & Development Company

Each year, we conduct a benchmarking survey of B2B services firms committed to building scalable, productized offerings. This year’s results left no room for ambiguity: speed to market is the #1 predictor of productization success. And yet, so many professional services organizations value perfection (or near perfection) over speed, which makes successful productization incredibly difficult.

In our 2025 Productization Benchmarking Findings, we share what the top-performing firms are doing differently—and faster—to meet and exceed their productization goals. This blog dives deeper into the findings and explains why, now, more than ever, prioritizing velocity over perfection is essential.

Speed to Market Is the Strongest Predictor of Success

According to our 2025 Productization Benchmarking Survey, organizations that launched a new product in under a year were four times more likely to exceed their productization goals. That’s not a small margin—it’s a game-changer.

Not only did these firms hit their revenue and gross margin targets, but they were also more likely to accelerate the shift to recurring revenue models. And they all shared one key trait: They launched quickly—even when their offerings weren’t perfect.

Why Speed is Hard for B2B Services 

Speed isn’t just a tactic—it’s a cultural attribute of strong product organizations. In our book Fearless: How to Transform a Services Culture and Successfully Productize, we identified speed as one of the four hallmarks of a product-friendly culture. Research has found that speed is also a marker for digitally mature organizations that have progressed in their digital transformation. Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, who studies digital transformation, found that top-performing organizations treat decisions as ‘working hypotheses’ and act even amidst ambiguity. They quickly develop Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) to test hypotheses in real life with real buyers and users.

Speed also fuels internal momentum. Small, visible wins help shift mindsets and accelerate support from the services side of the business.  Unfortunately, we often see perfectionism killing speed at many professional services organizations, and for good reason; these organizations have traditionally provided value to clients through highly polished, customized engagements. Service delivery employees can be reluctant to sell and deliver a less-than-perfect product because they fear that doing so puts their professional reputation with clients at risk.

But many organizations take too long to push a nearly perfect product to market. In doing so, they lose money in new product development or are surpassed by their competitors. Worse, they invest too much time and money in developing a product that, once released, is found to have a poor market fit. It can take many months—if not years— before they start receiving real market feedback on their ideas. Perfectionism limits the opportunities for quick-cycle feedback and testing that can tell you if a product is worth more investment.

Three Ways to Increase Speed to Market

The good news is that our research has found three ways for B2B services firms to successfully accelerate their speed to market:

1. Focus Resources on a Limited Number of Ideas

Top-performing firms aren’t flooding the market with dozens of new offerings. They’re choosing 2–4 products per year, launching in measured, focused ways. The strategy is not "spray and pray"—instead, organizations are selectively and thoughtfully launching offerings based on focused priorities.

This “start small, scale smart” approach enables teams to focus their resources and learn quickly from real market feedback. Often, we see organizations move too slowly because they try to build for scale way too early before they have even validated if customers want the solution. Building for scale requires perfection and lots of time, whereas validating demand is the most critical step, and it can be quick. 

Another standout finding is that firms that integrated a structured Voice of Customer (VOC) process outperformed peers by 15%.

Why? Because guessing is slow, especially when you go through the full development cycle (even if it is just an MVP) for every guess. Calling up your customers and getting their feedback on concepts can save a lot of pain that will seem obvious in retrospect. Feedback loops speed up decision-making, refine assumptions, and help teams get to the right solution faster.

The best teams are bringing customers into the process early—co-creating prototypes, validating pricing, and pressure-testing value propositions. As one survey respondent shared, "We don’t launch to our customers—we launch with them."

One tactic we like is to use two-week discovery sprints, not just development sprints. During this time, the team runs some market research, ideates, and validates with potential end users or buyers.

One CEO we worked with shared, 

“Discovery sprints helped us prioritize and make manageable the assumptions that we needed to test. We could think and work faster and we could see and celebrate progress along the way. It was much more effective to connect small insights and small changes, as opposed to waiting for a grand unveiling.”

In other words, they had a mindset shift: progress, not perfection, is the goal.

3. Dedicated Resources Are a Force Multiplier

If you're trying to productize off the side of someone's desk, stop. Organizations that dedicated at least one full-time equivalent (FTE) to productization were 36% more likely to meet or exceed goals.

The key is having someone who owns the productization process end-to-end: coordinating VOC input, managing pilots, creating the commercialization strategy, and keeping momentum. This aligns with our guidance in Fearless— clear accountability, dedicated ownership, and the time to focus—that’s what turns ideas into impact.

Embrace the Imperfect Launch

The data couldn’t be clearer: If you want to beat your productization goals in 2025 and beyond, you need to get your offerings to market faster—even if they’re not perfect. The top firms aren’t cutting corners; they’re building cultures that embrace rapid learning, customer feedback, and iteration.

Stop waiting for perfect. Launch faster. Learn quicker. Productize more successfully. 

Missed our 2025 Productization Benchmarking webinar? You can watch the replay here.