Services businesses build products for a good reason: the margin curve is better and the knowledge is already there. Most of those products die for the same reason: they are staffed with the slack capacity of a business that has no slack capacity.
The trap
Every quarter, client work has a deadline and a contract, and the product has neither. So the product loses, every time, on a decision that looks locally correct and is globally fatal.
What breaks the pattern
- 01The product gets a named owner whose utilisation is not measured against billable work.
- 02It gets a real deadline with an external commitment attached - a cohort date, a launch, a paying pilot.
- 03It solves a problem the services side genuinely has, so internal use creates its own pressure.
- 04You accept a smaller v1 than the services business thinks is respectable.
A product inside a services company survives on external commitments, not internal enthusiasm.
The version that has worked for me: build it as an internal tool first, get it load-bearing, then decide whether it is a product. Axel started that way. So, functionally, did Quire.
Also posted on LinkedIn ↗