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Examples of Productization

"The most significant impact for us at Five to Flow working with Vecteris has been having a friendly journey with experts guiding us along the way. The coaching, group sessions with other clients, and tools and resources have been incredibly helpful to organize us in a way we wouldn’t have been otherwise."

- Kate Visconti, Founder & CEO, Five to Flow

 

What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with Vecteris?

Kate Visconti: Hello, I'm Kate Visconti, founder and CEO of Five to Flow. We have been working with Vecteris for several months now and I just wanted to share a quick testimonial about our experience. The first thing I wanted to talk about is the main challenge we need to overcome and working with. And I would say that that was probably a couple of things. Number one: really honing in on our target market and core buyer and testing the hypotheses of who would really want to buy this product or products from us and how they would engage. We also had some challenges with some dates and timelines, roles and responsibilities, and ensuring we had a clear path to our big launch. So we're proud to say that with the support coaching tools and resources with Vecteris, we were able to overcome our first big hurdle, which was actually taking the product to market by a deadline we set for October 1st 2024. And so we are really grateful to the Vecteris team for helping us overcome that challenge, while also targeting some key buyers, industries, and markets with that first launch.

 

Could you describe how the Vecteris Productize Pathway® helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?

Kate Visconti: The Productize Pathway helped our business at Five to Flow meet our number one project internal metric, which was our go live date. I also think a lot of the pathway helped us work out some decisions that hadn't been made. The templates and tools - specifically using miro boards and some of the content from the coaching sessions really helped us think through some of the details that we needed to have ready that we hadn't previously thought about. So this pathway taking a step by step approach, instead of trying to do everything at once, going through some key learnings with our setting up hypotheses, testing those, and completing some of the documentation really helped us actually set metrics not only for the journey of product organization, but how we want to measure our customers' success as well. So specific metrics for us going through the journey: number one is on scope, on time, and on budget with the launch. And then now that we're just at launch, we'll have to come back and share what kind of metrics we have. But the press release had probably some of our best metrics of a press release in the past. We've had some great interactivity with the product in the market and we will be able to measure some of the outcomes coming soon that we'll share with other Vecteris clients.

What has been the most significant impact of working with Vecteris?

Kate Visconti: The most significant impact for us at Five to Flow working with Vecteris has been just having a friendly journey to take with experts to guide us along the way. The coaching, the group sessions with other clients, and the tools and resources have been incredibly helpful to organize us in a way we would not have been organized. Otherwise, I personally felt that the group sessions just listening to other Vecteris clients talk about their challenges gave us some A) empathy and B) ideas to work from kind of crowdsourcing opportunity versus just leveraging the experts within the the Vecteris team. My teammates who went through the program really enjoyed the interactivity and hearing other ideas from other product types and different industries and enjoyed leveraging the tools and resources available to them to feel like they were making progress along the way. A lot of what we felt through the whole series also was that the employees at Vecteris really actually cared about our product launch, experiencing our products themselves, and giving constructive feedback and support of what we are trying to accomplish as a company both as our coaches, but as consumers of what we've built. So having that dual approach, as well as the wider audiences across the other clients. And having that all be very interactive was the biggest impact.


"I had to change my viewpoint on what it meant to productize... There's space in the middle where you can create bumpers and frameworks for consistent delivery that's efficient and effective, building margin into your projects, while still being flexible and creative."

- Kerrie Luginbill, Chief Growth Officer at OTM 

 

What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with Vecteris?

Kerrie Luginbill: There were two main challenges we were looking to overcome with our work with Vecteris. One, was that for a number of years, we had been doing all of our service based work, completely customized. A client would come in, they would have a problem and we would completely customize a solution to them. That was resulting in the leadership team having to be really, really involved in every single project that we were working on. And it made it really hard to train new team members. The second challenge we had was we needed to find a way to make our services more profitable. And that's really hard to do when you are selling time and materials and you're not really sure how you're going to solve every single problem that you're working on. So what we were really looking for was a way to make the things that we do, consistent, repeatable and teachable to other people so that we didn't have to bring the leadership team in on every single project that we had. And we could start to look at ways to make certain steps in the process, more efficient or more profitable.
 
 

Could you describe how the Vecteris Productize Pathway® helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?

Kerrie Luginbill: The Productize Pathway® and boot camp was really instrumental in changing the way that I think about productization and service delivery. And I think it stems from, I'm a creative and I'm a really strategic thinker and I was afraid of productization for a long time because I thought that it would take the magic away from me. I thought it would make it so that we were a factory and that we weren't being creative. And that's not the case at all. And that was the biggest takeaway that I had is that I had to change my viewpoint on what it meant to productize. Productization is a spectrum. And I thought that if you weren't customized, you were scale, you know, completely out of the box delivering the same thing. And that's not really the case. There's space in the middle where you can create bumpers and frameworks so that you have consistent delivery, that's efficient and effective and building margin into your projects, where you also still have the ability to be flexible and creative. And so that mindset shift really teed up our agency to embrace productization more and it resulted in us creating what we call our system of refinement. And we take non-profitable services or services where we do not have a a specific process and we're doing everything customized and we run it through a series of exercises and mapping and things that I learned through the boot camp. And we go through that process for all of these services and we've been able to actually take some of our least profitable, our most unprofitable services and make them some of our most profitable services. And I can't recall all of the data off the top of my head. But one of them was how we delivered social media marketing and we were actually losing money every time we created social media calendars for clients. And today it's one of our profitable service lines. And so that in itself was incredibly rewarding. But the tools that our team has now and our mindset on how we can create repeatable, consistent, efficient processes to deliver work is something that was invaluable to our ability to scale, to build profit margin and to be able to grow and be the type of agency that we want to be.
 
 

What has been the most significant impact of working with Vecteris?

Kerrie Luginbill: One of the areas that my team really struggled with myself included was prioritization along this productize journey. We needed to fix so much or change so much that it was really hard to identify where to start or what to do to even get started. As a full-service marketing agency, you can imagine we have a lot of different services. There's social media and there's digital advertising and there's PR and there's graphic design and website design. All of these different services that all kind of needed to be looked at and revamped and through the productize boot camp, I was able to really figure out what steps to take, in what order, and then learn how to prioritize for greatest impact. Something we had never really done before was analyze the impact of each service before prioritizing which services to work on. We would just pick whichever one hurt the most, but that might not have been the service that our clients really valued the most. And so something Vecteris taught me was to look at what our customers care about and start there and make sure that the problem we're solving was urgent and expensive. And now whenever we decide we want to create a new service or we want to refine a service that we already offer, we look at how urgent and expensive that problem is. And if it's not, it goes to the bottom of the list or doesn't even make the list at all. And that is a process that we had never had in place before. And something that I think allowed us and freed us up mentally and from a resource perspective to focus on the things that really mattered.

"The biggest impact of working with Vecteris has been that change of mindset into productization…not just creating deliverables for specific clients, but thinking about how we make a product that will address multiple clients. This shift to a long-term, strategic approach has been phenomenal."

- Hector Medina, Product Manager at Scale Strategic Solutions

 

What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with Vecteris?

Hector Medina: The main challenge that we needed to  overcome with Vecteris was learning  how to productize. We don't have a history of making products. We have a history of doing a lot of services and maybe our product will be a specific report for one specific client. And so turning that around and understanding our customer more and doing more research with our customer, instead of doing research for our customer has been very, very insightful and that was the main challenge was understanding how do we take services that we've done and turn them into products. And that has been a great change for us personally, for me, it's helped me grow in a more strategic mindset and really working B2B and not doing research B2C has been a change. And that has also been a challenge in terms of research methodology, recruiting, and that has pushed us all into different mindsets a lot more strategic, a lot more long term, and not necessarily how do we build this specific report for this specific client, but understanding what, how are we addressing this client's needs and how do we make that into a product that will sell itself and that has been very cool.

 

Could you describe how the Vecteris Productize Pathway® helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?

Hector Medina: Vecteris has helped our business in showing us and helping us and guiding us with this structure on how to create products from services. It's something that we've never done before. And it's pushing us to think in new and bigger ways. We're thinking of how do we create more revenue, how do we meet these customers needs so that they continue to purchase from us. And that has been one of the biggest changes that has come about from Vecteris and one of the things that has helped us the most, and to get used to this new mindset of productization and not creating personalized services.

 

What has been the most significant impact of working with Vecteris?

Hector Medina: Yeah, I'd say the biggest impact of working with Vecteris, which I've said a few times has been that change of mindset into productization and not focusing on personalized services, personalized reports. As I've mentioned, doing research with our customers, understanding our customers more and not doing research for our customers. And this has helped us to think in a very, very long term strategic mindset. Whereas previously, I'd say we were waiting more for the next client,  et cetera, et cetera and thinking about, you know, these short term reports, research, what project that we have to do. But now we're thinking, how do we understand our customers needs to create products that will help them over a long period of time and how do we make this revenue recurring over a long period of time right? And that has been a mindset that has  changed us because we're not so focused  on just creating deliverables for specific clients. We are thinking about how do we make a product that will address multiple clients? And that has been very impactful for us because we're a small consulting firm, very kind of rooted in what we've always done and changing  that has been very important in, in pushing us to think long-term strategic and not necessarily just tactic, how do we get this done? But it's more, how do we understand our customers' needs and adapt ourselves to create products to meet those needs and how do we make those customers, recurring customers? And that has just been phenomenal.


"The real problem though that we faced was that we had no idea how to do it…how to change our IP into something that one could sell on a unitized basis, how to go to the market. So, long story short, we needed Vecteris to help us with all of that."

- Stephan Malherbe, Chair and CEO

 

What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with Vecteris?

Stephan Malherbe: The main challenge that our company Genesis is facing is one that I believe is universal to virtually all consulting companies in the world right now. and that is how do we continue to deliver value and to help our clients in the context of ubiquitous AI that will really take care of a lot of the bread and butter analytical work that's been done by firms like ourselves over many years in many different situations and markets. And this is where Vecteris comes in because the short answer we believe is for firms like ourselves to be  a lot more proactive going into the market, finding areas of value, and delivering that value to our clients. And one way of doing that is products, products have a lot of advantages that I don't need to go into now. If you're watching this video, you will probably have a sense of why products can really be important receptacles if you wish of IP ongoing learning incredible efficiencies and therefore ultimately incredibly good value for clients, but also good value for firms like ourselves from a business perspective. The real problem though that we faced was that we had no idea how to do it, no idea how to do products, no idea how to conceptualize our products, how to change our IP into, something that one could sell on a unitized basis, how to go to the market. And in between those steps, how do we find out, you know, what the market really want, what it would be prepared to pay. So long story short, we needed Vecteris to help us with all of that.

 

Could you describe how the Vecteris Productize Pathway® helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?

Stephan Malherbe:The Vecteris Productize Pathway is a really smart way to embody all the learning that Vecteris brings to these these processes. And where we really had an incredible challenge was not with the visioning of what we thought our services could do. We were really looking at at two elements. The one was a large health surveys to productize that. and we do these surveys across Africa and indeed across the entire young world. But secondly, also, and this is a second product, a tool for getting governments to figure out how to spend their money better, particularly on social services. And that we've done in a traditional consulting way in countries in the Middle East as well as in North Africa. And we wanted to productize that. So we had a lot of challenges that we needed help with. And the Productize Pathway really showed the way for us how to make that more concrete. First and foremost, we had to understand what the market really wants. What's the problem that we are solving for? Is it urgent? Is it important? Is it costly? And then to really get us to speak to our clients in a disciplined way about important things such as  price points as well as getting a sense of how we could ultimately go to market. So these have been the areas on which we've worked most closely with Vecteris and their fantastic team, people like Jaime, Molly, JeiLi, and Jason to really get to the bottom of a step by step approach that even a product engineers like ourselves could use.
 

 

What has been the most significant impact of working with Vecteris?

Stephan Malherbe: There's been quite a number of impacts from working with Vecteris, and I think the best is yet to come. But the ones that I want to point out right now happened early on already, firstly, just gave us a lot more clarity about how to run this part of our business. And secondly, it gave us confidence, confidence that we can actually change our consulting bespoke activities into either productized services or into products. And that means that it's opened the door to a whole bunch of new business opportunities for us, the ones that we are working on directly with Vecteris, but also ones that we see coming down the line in other parts of our business. Suddenly we have a language to talk about products. We understand what makes them succeed and fail. We understand what the steps are to develop them using the Productize Pathway. And in that journey, our hand is held quite effectively and sometimes quite firmly by Vecteris. Vecteris has really been a good partner to us in this honest, constructive, clear firm, and expert. I also think that that I should mention and maybe this is not intended to be a part of the package, but it's also made us more successful at our core consulting business. Some of these products have landed in their first incarnation as quite big consulting gigs that we will use in a twofold manner. One to do that work and to earn that money, but also to use it to really develop the products that we want to take more broadly into the market that would not have happened. Had we not been in a more disciplined frame of mind working, working with Vecteris going down the  Productize Pathway.