Insights on How to Productize Services and Solution Offerings

A few weeks ago I was speaking with a prospective client who had recently sold his consulting firm to a larger, global firm. He wanted help persuading the parent company to invest in growing a niche SaaS product that his team created. He was frustrated by the parent company’s inability to understand why it would be useful to supplement their consulting services with this SaaS product. At one point in the conversation, I asked him to drop a hyperlink into the chat. He said, “I don’t know how to do that.” 

We frequently like to profile Product Leaders we admire to help inspire you and your team. This month, we are excited to introduce you to Purbita Banerjee.

A company developed a successful AI product based on thorough customer research and launched it quickly, generating revenue. However, the cost of maintaining the necessary tool infrastructure for a growing customer base and promised price tiers made the product unprofitable. Despite doing almost everything correctly, the product team was directed to shut down the product because it was losing money for the company. The company needed to build a good pro forma for the product.

One CEO recently shared with me, “We need to restructure our incentive plan. Our consultants are all incented on short-term revenue, which is making it very hard to get traction with our new products that have lower price points but better margins and more revenue visibility.”

Sarah, a Senior Partner at a leading HR consulting firm, called me for some advice. Her team was struggling to bring productized services fully to market. As we talked through her situation, it became clear that they had lots of great ideas but weren’t prioritizing and, therefore, trying to tackle too many things at once. With that divided attention, her team wasn’t seeing ideas all the way through to successfully launch. They had confused internal activity with client-facing impact, and the lack of a structured, cross-functional review meant they had invested significant time and partner resources into ideas that didn't generate immediate, measurable value for the firm or their customers.

If this scenario sounds familiar, your organization is likely facing the same challenge. You need a critical pause point — a Quarterly Product Review.

Whom to hire—and when to hire them—to score big product wins. 

Many business-to-business services organizations are beginning to realize the accelerated growth potential of scalable, more productized business models. The opportunity to create higher customer value at a lower cost has led many organizations to make big moves to capitalize on the promise of a productized business model and evolve their culture to be more "product friendly." They are looking to change their cultures to enthusiastically support their offerings' diversification and prioritize building new scalable products that augment their existing portfolio of 1-to-1 services. 

This past year I turned 40, and my wife and I welcomed our second child. With these significant life milestones, I started to think about where I wanted to take my career next. One of the guiding principles I used was the Japanese concept of ikigai.

To play at a high level, these companies have to undergo significant organizational transformation.