One of the mistakes that entrepreneurs do is to spend a lifetime seeing a Service as a Service, keeping undefined boundaries, quality levels and timing. The problem with that mindset is that scaling what we offer will always remain a difficult task. We, including our collaborators, have a limited time and amount of efforts we can put into offering a service, but nothing will compensate working even harder if we seek for growth. Chances are high that the top heavy cost of committing to that approach will overwhelm any additional efforts, which make growth even more harder.

In tech companies and startups, a Service or a Product primary goal is to offer value and differentiate it from the competition by offering an affordable, faster and easy to use one.. But not just value to the end customers, the growth is what a company is seeking. The idea of switching from a Service to selling it as a Product is the DNA of the Startup mindset. I'm not saying here that small is bad, small and minimal in fact has a lot of power, but if something has the potential to reach new levels of growth it should seek for it. A consistent growth not necessarily a parabolic one.

To mention here, that many of the Tech Startups, can turn into service companies allowing them to keep going and pushing. Same thing we did, after facing monetization and market challenges, we decided to offer our services for Startups builders and ventures. Most of the companies refers to that model as Technical Team as a Service (Backend, front end, mobile, devops .. ) , where a technical team is responsible for building a Product under the direction of a Product manager and a clear business and technical roadmap.

So, do you offer a service value? there is a chance that it can be turned into a Product, but how?

Modularity & Microservices

Code developers use this concept a lot, when engineering a tech service into modules each one responsible for a certain feature or business requirements. Instead of shipping a whole monolithic service, we decouple it into modules (microservices). Making the boundaries well defined and coupling minimal.

It's really important to streamline the scope of a service, it's customers and how you'll deliver it, and most important to commit to that mindset change. Modeling the service components to define the clear inputs and outputs. The goal of any service in the end is to offer a clear contract and well known dependencies. The goal of this challenge is to systematize the processes and to have better usage of time and available resources. Hence, converging to a predictable Product that says something about your business maturity and value.

It's all about providing more value to the customers, by rethinking what you do as Products. It's a rewarding circle, the more consistent you work towards that approach, the more happier customers and revenue stream you'll have, as a result a business entity that will thrive and take care of itself.