Ask HN: Good read about productizing engineering consulting services? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good read about productizing engineering consulting services?

20 pointsXanther5 comments

I work for a large Civil/Infrastructure Engineering Consulting firm. Our bread and butter is to sell consultant hours to solve our clients' problems. It's a very project based approach. We have recently started investing a lot in building products to turn consulting experience into products (most of them digital). From my observation (I am a intermediate level product manager with domain knowledge), it's really hard to build products. Are there any material out there that I can read?

So far I've found this HBS article a very good start: https://hbr.org/2016/09/putting-products-into-services

This is also a good general advice:

https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/resources/articles/product/transitioning-from-services-into-product-management/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content

I am looking for more in depth material. Case studies/frameworks/books/articles/blogs...

I was having trouble finding a deep guide too, so I started writing one!

Feel free to look at my draft below, and let me know what’s missing.

[1] https://producteyes.pages.dev/product-eyes/guide

I've just skimmed this so far but this looks like an excellent resource!

Don’t know how this translates into Civil Engg but I was a software architect for a consulting company that did the same for a segment of the insurance industry.

Based on underwriting and accounting practices in that segment our company built core software libraries that embodied a common set of operations and transactions and best practices.

We would then customize these for the specific client. We would structure the contract so that it was hours billed plus a % like 20% that would be billed as licensing fee for the use of the libraries.

This would turn out best for both parties as we would get to bill multiple times to different clients for the work done once and they would save on the cost of building these libs from scratch.

We would of course factor in some free maintenance bug fixes etc but only in the core libs. Separate maintenance /support contract for application.

Some variation of this may work for you.

I would say don’t be in a rush to build products and be iterative in your approach, learning lessons along the way.

Some of the product companies are very speCIalized in what they do. There is no one size fits all.

Crossing the Chasm is a must read for building tech based products

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