Sneak Peek At New Book For Professional Services Firms: PRODUCTIZE
Productize: The Ultimate Guide to Turning Professional Services into Scalable Products
When the world shut down a year ago, business began to slow for many professional services firms. For many, the slowdown created an opportunity – or urgent need – to try to productize their services as a strategy to grow scalably, improve valuations, and fend off new digital-first competitors.
Since I’ve seen many firms waste a lot of money unsuccessfully trying to productize, I used the slowdown to write a book explaining why. Admittedly, I did not fully appreciate the herculean task in front of me but fast forward a year and, amazingly, the book is finished—it is ready to publish in a few short weeks.
Why Productization Often Fails
My thesis is that firms often fail to successfully productize for two reasons. First, they tend to massively underestimate how difficult it is to add a product business model alongside a services business model. Second, they do not recognize how hard it is to develop successful new products, even in the best conditions (new product failure rates are estimated to be somewhere between 40-70%).
New product development and commercialization are often outside of their core skills, processes, and mindsets for companies that deliver highly customized services. Productizing services typically requires organizations to think differently about how they work and create value for their customers. This change does not come easily.
I wrote Productize: The Ultimate Guide to Turning Professional Services into Scalable Products to fill a gap in the marketplace for professional services organizations that want to innovate and develop more scalable—often tech-enabled—products. It is backed by over twenty years of experience building productized consulting, training, information services, and data services businesses.
Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes – and How to Avoid Them
The book first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy and then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any professional services business leader who wants to accelerate growth successfully.
Productize includes real-life case studies and stories featuring professional services leaders who have successfully led their organizations to create more scalable services and products. It also includes more than two dozen tools and templates to help teams implement the tactics so they don't have to start from scratch.
In this book, readers will learn:
- how to shift your culture to embrace a product-mindset
- the capabilities you need to be successful and whether or not you should acquire them or grow them internally
- how much money to invest in exploring and building more scalable solutions and products
- how to ensure there is a viable market for your product idea
- how to sequence investments in new product development
- how to successfully source and work with developers and data scientists
- how to inexpensively test your ideas before investing in development
- how to win the hearts and minds of your sales team to ensure your new products are commercially successful