Productization
productized service
Turning bespoke work into a defined offering with a fixed scope, price and delivery process. It trades some revenue per client for margin, predictability and the ability to hand the work to someone else.
In practice
Instead of quoting each migration separately, one offer: a fixed scope, four weeks, one price, the same eleven steps each time. The tenth is profitable because the process did the work.
The common mistake
Productizing before the process is written down. A fixed price on undocumented work transfers all the risk to you and keeps every delivery dependent on the person who invented it.
Productization is turning custom work into a defined offer with a fixed scope, a fixed price and a repeatable process. It is the main route out of selling time.
What changes
A custom service is scoped, priced, staffed and delivered differently every time. A productized service has one shape: the same deliverable, the same sequence, the same price, sold repeatedly.
The consequences run through the whole business. Sales get shorter, because there is nothing to design during the conversation. Delivery gets cheaper, because the process is known and the tenth run is faster than the first. Quality gets more consistent, because the work does not depend on which person picks it up. And the business becomes explainable, which is what makes it referable and eventually sellable. See owner dependency.
The steps
- Find the repeat. Look at recent work for the engagement you have run several times. Productization formalizes something you are already doing.
- Fix the outcome, not the hours. Name what the client ends up with.
- Write the process down. Every step, in order, with the templates. This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that removes you.
- Fix the price. Fixed price is what transfers delivery risk to you and gives you the incentive to make the process efficient.
- Define the edges. What is excluded, how many rounds, who is involved. See scope creep.
What it costs
You lose the ability to say yes to everything, and some genuinely good work falls outside the offer. Real judgment work resists productization, and forcing it produces a worse service sold at a worse price.
The other cost is that fixed price means you carry the overrun. The first few runs will be underpriced while you learn what the process actually takes. That is tuition rather than failure, provided you adjust afterwards.
Concept web
Open the full webQuestions
What is productization?
Converting custom service work into a defined offer with fixed scope, fixed price and a documented, repeatable process, sold the same way each time.
How do you productize a service?
Identify work you have delivered repeatedly, define the outcome rather than the hours, document every step of the process, set a fixed price, and state what is excluded.
What are the downsides of productization?
You must decline work that falls outside the offer, and fixed pricing means you absorb overruns. Work whose value is genuine case-by-case judgment resists it.