Incentivising Productisation
Incentivising Productisation involves the implementation of strategies and incentives to encourage Internal Product teams to transform their offerings into standardised, repeatable products.
Goal
The goal is to remove the blocking dependencies that Stream Teams face when they need to interact with internal departments. By converting services into self-service products, the Internal Product Team can provide more predictable, scalable, and aligned services to Stream Teams.
Ultimately the products can become external products that can be sold to customers, creating new revenue streams for the ecosystem.
Context
The biggest risk for an Internal Product Team is that they are seen as a cost center, which leaves them vulnerable to budget cuts. But not all of the problems that Internal Product Teams are solving are unique to the company. Every industry requires financial support, legal advice, HR services and more, and the most successful internal services often graduate into external products. Segment pivoted from a classroom lecture tool when they realised that their internal tool for moving data between systems was more valuable. AWS started the same way (see the table below).
"Our work is too bespoke to productise"
The most common objection to productising an internal service is that the work is too case-by-case to systematise. The most instructive counter-examples come from outside the organisation — companies that took work the entire industry believed was bespoke and built a product around it:
| Domain | The bespoke view | The productised interface | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud infrastructure | Every system has unique requirements; servers, networking, storage and databases each need bespoke configuration by a specialist. | Self-serve APIs and consoles for compute, storage, networking, databases, identity and observability — provisioned in seconds, billed by the second. | AWS |
| Company formation | The legal tasks required to register a company are long, complex and vary by jurisdiction. Lawyers are needed to guide you through the process. | A guided self-serve flow that incorporates the company, opens banking, issues founder equity and handles the related compliance and tax filings. | Stripe Atlas |
| International hiring | Employment law is different in every country; hiring abroad means setting up a local entity, engaging local employment counsel and running local payroll. | A platform that issues compliant employment contracts, runs payroll and benefits, and manages tax and compliance across more than 150 countries. | Deel |
Each of these productised work that experts in the field had insisted was too case-by-case to systematise. The teams who productised them committed to the abstraction, accepted that it would not cover 100% of cases, and made the 80% it did cover dramatically faster and cheaper for everyone — including the experts.
The same logic applies inside an organisation. Legal, Operations, Marketing and Security all run repeating patterns of work, and turning those patterns into self-serve interfaces — whether templates, automated checks, decision trees, runbooks, dashboards or tone-of-voice guides — is what unblocks Stream Teams without overloading the function. The novel and ambiguous work still escalates; the everyday work clears itself.
Inputs
| Artifact | Description |
|---|---|
| Internal Services | The services which are currently provided by the Internal Product Team to Stream Teams. |
| Customer Pain Points and Unmet Needs | Understanding the needs and priorities of Stream Teams to tailor services and pricing accordingly. |
| Solution Ideation | Brainstorming and ideation sessions to identify potential products that can be developed from existing services. |
| Evaluative Experimentation | Testing and validating product ideas with Stream Teams to ensure they meet their needs and expectations. |
| Iterative Development | Developing and refining products based on feedback and insights from Stream Teams. |
Outputs
| Artifact | Description | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| 6-Pager | A concise document outlining a project or proposal, including background, problem statement, solution, and next steps. | Ensures alignment and understanding among stakeholders. |
| Press Release and FAQs | A press release format highlighting the benefits to customers and answering the key questions related to the product, how it will work and how to overcome potential challenges. |
Anti-patterns
- Insufficient incentives: Offering rewards or incentives that are not sufficiently attractive to motivate real change.
- Lack of support: Not providing enough resources or support for teams attempting to productise services, leading to failed initiatives.
- Neglecting feedback: Ignoring feedback from service users and Stream Teams, which is crucial for refining productised services.