“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.”
― Erma Bombeck
When services firms choose to pursue a productization strategy, they can face many challenges. I’ve seen companies fail because they didn’t have the right skills, poor product-market fit, or they under-invested in go-to-market. Another significant challenge is changing the organization’s behavior and culture to be more product friendly. Consider this:
Most professional services organizations deliver their expertise through one-to-one customized interactions. When these organizations decide to grow through productization, they need to learn how to deliver expertise at scale.
Services organizations who want to pursue a strategy of productization first need to make sure their leadership team understands and supports the strategy. This includes building a business case for productization, collaboratively defining the new business model, and modeling necessary behavior change.
A management consulting firm recently partnered with Vecteris to develop a strategy for ‘productizing’ their services. As part of this work we also helped them assess whether or not they had the capabilities to support a product innovation growth strategy. We did this because good ideas are not enough.
I can’t believe that three years have passed since we launched Vecteris at the Women in Product Conference in San Francisco back in 2018! So much has happened and this seemed like a good moment to stop, reflect, and celebrate.
One of the unexpected gifts of the pandemic has been our launch of (virtual) peer groups of Product Leaders. At least once a week, we get the chance to convene small groups of product leaders to discuss their challenges and share experiences. We cover a variety of topics such as how to better catalog and use customer feedback or how to reduce custom development. A very frequent topic is talent. Especially, how to attract and retain good product talent when you are not a tech company.
Fall is my favorite time of year. The kids go back to school (thank goodness), leaves change colors, pumpkin spice returns AND, for many organizations, budgeting season kicks off! As a Type-A planner, I love budgeting season because it's where we translate our vision and strategy into tangible spending commitments for the upcoming year.
