

Productising a Service Business (Part 1) - dools
http://www.theprocedurepeople.com/blog/2014/09/22/productising-a-service-business-part-one-separating-capabilities-from-products/

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UK-AL
Financial Services and Insurance Services sell actual products though. An
option is a product, insurance policies are products.

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dools
Right, they are. But what makes them a product? Really, all they are is a
contract, an agreement. A really really well defined agreement. There are also
associated processes for executing that agreement.

How does that differ from, say, the person who "knows heaps about the web and
will build you a website"? Well, their agreement (and processes, usually)
aren't as well defined.

My point is that those financial/insurance companies are really service
businesses, it's just that their services are so well defined they behave like
products, and that you can do it too.

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dchuk
An options contract or an insurance policy can be re-sold to another party
without anyone needing specialized "service-like" knowledge. Generally you can
classify something as a product if it can be re-sold without a specialist
being involved.

You can't really re-sell a web developer.

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notahacker
You _can_ package web development into neat, resellable chunks, but however
scalable it might ultimately be, selling scripts, templates and cookie-cutter
CMS installations is a million miles from financial services and insurance:
you're actually pitching at an audience who have lower budgets than you'd have
for custom design and marketing projects, and facing plenty of competition.

People in finance and insurance are highly paid precisely because regulators
(and demanding clients) are persuaded that a certain level of service is
required which avoids the appearance of competition from low end commodity
products, and because the problems they solve are much larger than "how should
I skin the company blog?"

