“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.”
― Erma Bombeck
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.
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.
For the past three years both of my kids have been involved in FIRST – For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology – a global organization with robotics programs for kids ages 4-15, aimed at introducing children to STEM careers through fun, hands-on learning coupled with real-world problem-solving.
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.
Imagine you run a marketing consulting firm. The firm has a market intelligence database and data analysis methodology that it uses as part of its highly customized consulting engagements. It’s pretty lucrative.
