A friend of mine read my blog post about the differences between products and services.
He emailed me recently and asked me about something I wrote that stood out to him.
I wrote: “If you’re organized enough, you can productize your services. Software is useful for this.”
He asked me: “What does it mean to ‘productize your services’? Or, more specifically, another phrase I’ve heard, to ‘productize yourself’?”
Mr. Ready is an IT professional – a very smart, talented technology engineer. I wanted to be thoughtful in how I answer his questions, so I suggested that I write my response as a blog post. He loved the idea.
So, here we are.
What did I mean when I said: “If you’re organized enough, you can productize your services. Software is useful for this.”?
I was referring to the possibility for a person deploying a services business model to transform their offerings and benefit from the repeatability of a product model.
What Mr. Ready wants to know is: What are the building blocks of that transformation?
What does it mean to serve?
First, let’s consider a broad definition of the word services.
Every human is here to serve. Everyone has something to offer others. All of us exist in an intertwined web of human relationships built upon the exchange of services, whether we realize it or not.
Notably, the exchange of services doesn’t always have economic implications. There are all types of organizations, associations, churches and charities who serve others for nothing in return. Or good Samaritans. Or friendly neighbors.
Non-economic services are part of the service exchange web – happening all around us, all the time.
This is really important to soak in. We serve not just for financial incentive. We serve because we want to. Humans serve because it’s innate.
But my blog post was about businesses providing products and services for a profit. Here, examples run the gamut from a simple local businessperson to the most highly-qualified professional in a given field. The former scratches out a living, the latter gets paid like a king – both for performing services for others.
More recently, the internet opened the door for humans to serve each other by providing information. This is the domain of the modern-day knowledge worker. Someone like Mr. Ready.
Mr. Ready wants to know how to productize his unique part of the human services web.
Here’s how I would think about it:
Step One: Subject Matter Expertise
The first step for Mr. Ready is to develop subject matter expertise. Mr. Ready is well educated and has a lot of professional experience. There are several subjects in which he already has core knowledge. He learned a lot in school, and he continues to accrue knowledge from experience. He also studies on his own. From that base of core knowledge, he spends a lot of time engaging in critical thinking. Engaging in critical thinking allows him to become very good at solving problems within his subject areas. And being good at solving problems is the expertise that brings value to other people – these are the services he can provide to others. People pay for problem solving.
This is the first step in productizing your services: becoming a subject matter expert by mastering how to solve problems.
A lot of people stop at this first step.
Across the internet, we see so-called subject matter experts purveying their viewpoints. Some are charlatans, some are real.
The charlatans summarize their lived (or made up?) experience and parlay it into a course for you to buy. A chunk of summarized knowledge for sale. It’s often surface level and leaves buyers dissatisfied. This is the cheap side of the world’s subject matter experts. It’s a microwave meal.
But that’s not Mr. Ready – he’s more patient than the microwavable charlatan crowd. He gives himself time to naturally drift into the subjects where his judgment and experience can compound. He’s a continuous learner because he enjoys the process, not because he’s chasing the economic exploitation of his knowledge. Accordingly, his subject matter expertise has depth. It’s hard won and fought for. It’s a steak dinner.
Mr. Ready could stop at step one. Many consulting practices or speaking tours have been built at this stage, not to mention the online course. Arguably, all of these are a version of productizing the service of providing subject matter expertise.
But Mr. Ready wants more.
Step Two: Creativity Leads To Philosophy Development
The second step for Mr. Ready is to start creating.
Being creative is the pathway towards unlocking one’s personal philosophy. And creating, in this sense, means writing or recording oneself. The process informs you of who you are, and how you view the world.
Mr. Ready has to get his thoughts out of his head and down on paper, or audio, or video. Even if he never shares it with anyone.
And not just the vanilla version of his thoughts – he has to find the good stuff. The good stuff is his personal perspective on the world. It’s his unique perspective.
He has to discover where his personal life philosophy overlays on top of the subjects where he has expertise.
Creativity is the catalyst for that search.
One thing I’ve learned from developing a writing habit is that the process of writing itself crystalizes my thinking. Rather than having a bunch of thoughts neatly organized in my head, really they’re sitting there randomly strewn around my brain and disconnected from each other. The process of writing them down is what creates the connections. They usually come out jumbled at first, and then somehow take shape into something coherent. It feels like magic sometimes.
The magic of my creativity is unlocking my personal philosophy.
Step Three: Specific Knowledge
The third step for Mr. Ready is to discover his specific knowledge. This is a concept I lifted from Naval Ravikant, who talks about specific knowledge in his “How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)” tweetstorm. There’s also a 3.5 hour audio recording of Naval and one of his colleagues discussing specific knowledge and many other wealth creation concepts at length. I consider this set of recordings a must listen, especially for folks like Mr. Ready.
For Naval’s description of specific knowledge, you can find it here.
Here’s specific knowledge in a nutshell:
Specific knowledge is often at the edge of the body of human knowledge – found by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.
(Most of these are Naval’s words, some are mine.)
Specific knowledge is tailored to you individually. It’s about nuance.
It’s about recognizing your inherent soft skills that are inborn, combining them with the wisdom you’ve built up over time, and overlaying it with the activities in your life that really get you jazzed.
Mr. Ready will know he’s tapping into specific knowledge when he’s talking about a topic within his subject matter expertise and he feels something light up inside of him. It will feel like a burst of insight – an energetic shift. As if what he’s saying is coming from a deeper place inside himself.
Whenever that happens, Mr. Ready should write down what he just experienced – noting the topic, and how it made him feel.
Once Mr. Ready identifies his specific knowledge, he’s ready to productize himself.
Step Four: Productize Yourself
The fourth step is when Mr. Ready takes his specific knowledge and turns it into a product. It’s when he productizes himself.
He could sell a course about his subject matter expertise, but we covered that option at the end of step one already. It’s not what he’s looking for; it’s two-dimensional.
He could write a book, which feels like a more noble pursuit but still not what Mr. Ready is after. He’s mid-life. He still has time to write a book. Plus, it’s also two-dimensional.
He needs something more potent. He needs a product in 3D.
Recall what I said in the products versus services blog post that got this whole discussion started: “If you’re organized enough, you can productize your services. Software is useful for this.”
Software is the building block for creating new products in the present day. It’s a new phenomenon where humans can transform the visions in our minds into a real-life experience for others.
Software is a fascinating human tool because it allows us to share what’s happening in our imagination.
Our imagination is where our creativity informs our personal philosophy, and mixes it with our subject matter expertise to bring about specific knowledge. It’s the never-before-seen vision in our mind that somehow feels familiar. Imagination is what separates humans from other species. It’s where all the magic happens.
So in order to productize himself, Mr. Ready can build a software tool based on his imagination. Not a tool to simply give summaries of information as a subject matter expert, but a tool that conveys his specific knowledge in an imaginary way that makes it really easy for everyone to understand. And that software tool will have no competition, since it’s uniquely derived from Mr. Ready and his own personal magic.
That’s how Mr. Ready can productize himself.
Or, he could just create an online course.