Standardizing the offering is good work. Taking a complex delivery, making it repeatable, pricing it, making it scalable — that is exactly what a technical company should do.
The problem starts when the internal label becomes the market's language.
The product takes over the vocabulary
It happens gradually. Sales quotations are structured as products. Sales presentations walk through products. At some point, somebody is assigned product manager. An organization is built around the products, because that is how the offering was standardized.
Internally, this makes sense. The products make selling scalable.
But look at it from the customer's side: nobody wants to buy a product. They want a solution to a problem they have.
What a solution actually is
A solution is product plus services. You might sell your own product or somebody else's. Your own software or somebody else's. Then you add consultancy on top, or delivery, commissioning, training, support — whatever services make the problem actually go away.
That is what adds the value for the customer. And it is usually your DNA: the part that makes you stand out from the next company with a similar product.
How you package it internally might matter. How you deliver it matters more.
Example: the platform that became eight products
I have seen this at its extreme: a company with one product marketing it as eight. Each module got its own name, its own product manager, its own message.
Then each product manager starts comparing his own product with competitors' products. But those competitors compete at product level, not platform level. They do only that one thing. The platform company does all eight. They are competing on something completely different — but because a product organization was built and ownership was added at product level, every one of them now sees their task in a silo.
Eight products marketed as eight products. The customer never wanted eight products. They wanted one solution to their problem.
Example: the engineering price list
The same happens outside software. A pump or boiler supplier with a quotation built like a product list: article numbers, options, delivery time.
The customer's problem is not a pump. It is steam delivered at a stable pressure for the next ten years. That solution is the product plus installation, commissioning, a service agreement, monitoring, spare parts and advice. The product gets you into the conversation. The services are where the value is — and usually the margin.
Keep the standardization. Change the language.
The product structure is not the mistake. Talking about it as if the customer should care is.
- Keep the internal packaging, the product names and the product managers, if they make the delivery scalable.
- Quote and present the outcome: what the customer's situation looks like afterwards.
- Package solutions around the customer's problem — the product plus the services around it, named for what it does.
- In marketing, let product pages serve the people searching for specifications. Let the story be about the problem and the solution.
If you want an outside view of where your language says product and your customer hears noise, write to me.