Dear Service Business:

You may never transition to building your own products. Why?

Because although you may be good at building ideas when they are well defined – read concrete, you are not good at figuring out what to build.

What are the skills that a service business develops that don’t translate well to the product business world?

• Focus on implementation instead of concept/design
• Hunt and pounce client acquisition
• Short term development

Focus on implementation – you build stuff other people have already come up with. Coming up with something viable (and I’m talking about the process of burning through 1000s of ideas and prototypes to get to something that MIGHT actually work) and the other half — believing in your concept before it becomes successful is REALLY REALLY HARD… And it’s a process which product companies have to develop.

Hunt and pounce client acquisition – is what most service companies do – “We need to work up a bid for…” – which is totally different than, “Why aren’t people buying…” – The first tries to fit the business to the client the business is going after. The second tries to fit the client to what the business provides. These are two very different tasks.

Short term development – In my experience, service businesses rarely end up living with the results generated from the products they build. If the application they built doesn’t “generate the leads” or “get viral adoption” or “scale with load” or “solve AIDS” which are the true desired business outcomes of many of the projects we work on, we service businesses never really know & usually we don’t care. We have our money. We don’t have to live with the consequences of the code we write and so we never get to learn the lessons an off target project would teach us.

I think this post isn’t really complete… I’m still thinking about it. There may be a follow up post in the future.