Fearless: How to Transform a Services Culture and Successfully Productize

Eisha Armstrong's first book, Productize, was a foundational shift for me in how to think about products in a traditionally services-based line of business. Fearless builds on that foundation by laying out the broader context of an organization that must shift for productization not to be a project in the corner but rather a differentiating strategy for the entire company. Armstrong and her co-authors draw on a vast number of examples to show the importance of culture, organizational models, and the approach to change management in determining the success or failure of a product strategy. I highly recommend this book for any CEO, product leader or solutions leader competing in a B2B services space with tech-enabled products or services.

As a B2B org leader, this book has helped changed MY mindset on how to lead my team productize our services. Now I have the necessary foundation to help change the culture of the team - so we are ready for what’s to come, and know we’ll come out greater on the flip side of productization. Eisha has done it again! Excited to download the extra tools from her website as we begin a major transformational effort for the next few months.

Highly recommended for anyone in a non-tech company that is trying to act more like a tech products company this book is a blueprint that will save you time and resources by guiding you around the many pitfalls that you are likely to encounter.

We are refining our approach to productizing our Org Development expertise and these ideas have shaped the way I think tremendously. A must read!

This is a fantastic guide for anyone new or trying to improve in a product management role – or for those of us who have product management as an aspect of what we do and want to upskill via proven industry insights.The book is divided into 3 parts: Culture, Organization & Operating Model, and Three Models for Change. It builds on the author’s ‘Productize Pathway’ framework explored in her earlier book: Productize: The Ultimate Guide to Turning Professional Services into Scalable Products. This book takes the reader several steps further into understanding how to build and leverage a culture conducive to successfully productizing within a services business.The Culture section explores the ‘Four Horseman of a Product-Friendly Culture’ (Knowing, Perfectionism, Scarcity Thinking, Individual Heroics) and offers a guide to antidotes necessary to overcome these common pitfalls. And it provides a framework for cultivating fearlessness in moving your mindset and culture so that you can avoid them altogether. You’ll definitely recognize aspects of your workplace culture in this section – and you’ll be grateful for the methods provided to break old habits and bad patterns.The Organization & Operating Model section provides specific examples and templates to help you build a product vision aligned to your company’s strategy. And it defines productization archetypes that you can review and distill to figure out the product management model most suited to your environment and business. For those in more control of the entire product organization, it even offers organization structure models with examples for mapping ideal structures to productization goals. Specific product functions are outlined and centralized vs. decentralized vs. hybrid models are presented, allowing you to use productization principles to determine the structure that’s right for your business. There’s also a chapter on Governance that offers specific best practices for how to set up and successfully manage product ideas and investments. A chapter on Talent includes questions to use during interviewing.The final section presents Three Models for Change, including Hire/Acquire, Incubating Product as a Separate Organization, and Creating a Movement within your existing organization’s culture and resources.Two huge thumbs up for this book, which also includes a myriad of downloadable checklists, models, and worksheets. If you’re serious about upping your product management game and you work in a services business, start here.

When I became the CEO of Linkage, I had a playbook in mind from previous business leadership experiences: I wanted to take our 30-year-old organization's exceptional data, frameworks, and custom professional services in the leadership sector and transform it with a productization strategy, knowing we could scale and have greater impact for all stakeholders.The vision, strategy, and plan proved to be easier than the organizational behaviors and culture required to achieve it. We had to overcome decades of entrenched behavior and beliefs about what our company did, what we stood for. The leadership had to model a new way forward, and ensure we had the full engagement of our teams. We had to create new structures, new processes, and new capabilities. It was hard, much harder than I anticipated. It took courage and resilience. It took being a little more fearless than I realized.This new book FEARLESS -- and its predecessor, PRODUCTIZE -- are two books that I needed five years ago. They will help accelerate any B2B leader looking to productize and scale a services organization. Fearless narrows in on the specific roadmap required to execute the cultural change that must accompany the strategic change, and it's full of relevant examples and actionable tools. A must have accompaniment on the exciting path of transformative growth through productization.