Insights on How to Productize Services and Solution Offerings

For better or for worse, 2020 has shown us how important innovation is as a core competency. Most organizations have had to engage in some type of new product innovation—whether that be creating entirely new products or features to meet more urgent customer needs or innovating existing products to be delivered virtually. 

In this incredibly dynamic and rapidly changing environment, innovation is more complicated, but it is also vitally important for our organizations. For example, this year many of us have had to significantly accelerate digital transformation of our services, our products, and our delivery channels. 

Many times, big problems are solved with small tactics. For example, my phone chargers frequently frey at the connectors. However, a small tactic – covering the connector with the spring from inside of a pen – can prevent the frey. One broken pen saves me hundreds in new charging cords. 

I spend a lot of time running Design Sprints for our clients.

What do Slack, IBM, McKinsey, Stanford, the City of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art have in common? They all solved urgent and expensive problems using Design Sprints - a unique process for quickly solving our customers’ urgent and expensive problems through ideation, prototyping, and testing. 

One of my favorite shelter-in-place binge shows has been LEGO Masters. Teams of LEGO enthusiasts compete to build original creations, and with each passing episode another team is sent home until a LEGO Master team is crowned. The show is fun, the builds are impressive and the show inspired my sons and me to haul out our tubs of LEGO and make our own new creations.

We recently published a blog about how innovation thrives in uncertainty. Uncertainty introduces constraints which, in turn, force us to get scrappy and inventive. But many of our clients are concerned that it is hard to innovate and collaborate when many teams are still working from home.

I confess that I laughed when I saw this cartoon on LinkedIn the other day:

I was speaking with a CEO a few weeks ago who said his team was struggling with new product innovation. I mistakenly assumed that the team had too many ideas, could not prioritize and focus, and, therefore, were diluting their efforts. Lack of focus is a problem I’m seeing with a lot of clients right now.

Many of our clients have been asking us for advice on how to stay competitive in this rapidly changing world. Customer behavior is changing rapidly and, if they are financially healthy, your competitors are likely innovating to adapt to these changes. Other competitors may be struggling and could become acquisition targets for you to bring on new assets or new customers or both. How do we stay on top of all this?

Enter: Lean competitive analysis