Insights on How to Productize Services and Solution Offerings
A collection of news, insights, and best practices for productizing services, conducting market research, developing new products, and commercializing offerings.
One of my favorite professional events is right around the corner. The annual Women In Product Conference is May 10-11 and it will be held virtually to allow more people to attend. I highly recommend it for all women currently in Product roles (the conference has different tracks for entry-level professionals all the way up to Executive roles) as well as for Product leaders who want to help more women succeed in Product roles.
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.
