If you’re a key member of a company that offers professional services and you’d like to be successful in product, I’d recommend that you consider two key paths. The first is to build a solution that will immediately benefit your professional services organization. The second is intended to compliment the services you currently offer and…
Adding a software product to your list of client offerings introduces a lot of exciting possibilities to help your professional services firm grow. However, without a well thought out product plan, this project can go sideways quickly. Remember greater than 9 out of 10 software products fail. I’m here to provide everything you need to…
Professional services firms have a tremendous opportunity right in front of them but most of them don’t realize it. The challenges associated with building and growing a successful professional services firm are relatively well known by those in the industry. I have first hand experience with these challenges myself in my effort to grow NxtStep.…
Scaling impact for mission driven organizations requires tackling unique challenges when compared with the typical approach to growing a company in the private sector. Startups in the private sector are typically focused on maximizing shareholder value. In recent years, it has become more common to see startups also add a mission driven approach to growing…
If you’ve successfully completed the solution design phase, it’s now time to put the first version of an actual product together so you can provide something to your clients that they can actually use. In this article, we’re going to dive deep into the build phase. The build phase only comes after we’ve successfully completed…
Now that you’ve completed the customer discovery phase and identified the top problems worth solving. You are ready to move forward to the next step in the process, solution design. The solution design phase is all about validating everything possible about your solution (future product) before you actually build it. This phase is very important…
How to identify problems worth solving for your software product Over the course of my product career, I’ve heard all about effective (and ineffective) product strategies when trying to bring a new software product to market. Over the course of reading probably hundreds of books and testing out even more strategies on products of my…
When I built my first software startup I was beyond excited. Knowing what I thought I knew about the startup world, all I had to do was work super hard, build a software product from scratch and once released (after it was perfect of course!) I wouldn’t be able to handle the volume of customers desperate to…
If you haven’t seen it yet, Peloton has recently released a new holiday commercial. If you do know about this commercial, then you also likely know about all the outrage from it – detailed here (rather hilariously) by Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah. What I’m going to talk about is how this commercial, despite the outrage,…
Sometimes when we’re building and selling our product, we feel things aren’t moving fast enough. In order to speed things up, we experiment with different strategies. A strategy I’ve written about before, details how to retool your product positioning by taking advantage of recent trends. The way the strategy goes is, if you can connect…