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A Finnish engineering, architecture, and project consulting company, AINS Group, recently opened an online store to purchase fixed-price services. The store presents specialist work in a product-like format, with fixed service names, defined scopes, and visible prices, such as a building history report, a zoning plan cost analysis, and a technical preliminary survey for a property transaction.
Is this productization a smart move or a sign that expert services are being commoditized?
The concept of “service productization”
Productization turns expertise into a more tangible package with a clear scope, timeline, outcome, and price point. The idea got traction in the late 1980s, but it became a named concept in the 2010s. Back in 2010, I published a SlideShare deck titled “Productize your service.” It received over 30,000 views and led to several consulting and training commissions that continue to this day.
The world-renowned service guru, Professor Christian Grönroos, has criticized the idea of services as products. “If flexibility and adaptability form the key sources of competitive advantage of services, what is the grand idea with eliminating or even reducing those capacities, instead of managing them?” he writes.
What Professor Grönroos suggests is that we stop trying to make services look like goods and instead systematize them in a customer-centric way. He would rather talk about the commercialization of services. I totally agree, but I’ll use ‘productization’ because it succinctly captures the concept.
What can be productized?
I once gave a presentation about service productization to a group of U.S. architects. The feedback was overly negative. Many saw the idea as a threat rather than an opportunity.
I was not suggesting they convert all their work into products, but rather presented this as a new business opportunity to stand out. I used “Green Loft Conversion” as an example of a well-scoped, systematic process targeted at building owners with unused attic or roof space.
If you have or can imagine a service with certain features, it has potential for productization. If the service is repeatable enough, you can define the scope clearly, and if it can be systematized, it has the makings of a product. You should be able to manage the risks and secure margins so that you can price it confidently. If you can teach it to others, you can scale it without relying on specific individuals.
Nowadays, AI is an integral technology for productization. It allows individualized service components to be cost-efficient.
Does productization make business sense?
Buying expert services is often a lengthy process and difficult if you’re not a professional buyer. A productized service with a clear outcome removes much of the friction and work involved in the traditional RFP process. A customer will likely choose the easier alternative if they find the price-value proposition satisfactory and the provider trustworthy.
For the service provider, profitability and scalability should be key results. Systematization requires an upfront investment, but the ROI can be high if the product aligns well with buyers’ needs and there is a big enough market.
Where to start?
You don’t have to aim for full-blown productization up front. You can start by modularizing an existing service and systematizing the modules that recur across projects.
A critical part of productization is understanding where variation will occur and how to manage it. An expert service will never be 100% deterministic; otherwise, a machine could do it.
Once you’ve gained experience in systematizing, you can productize an existing process or innovate new ones.
Systemic productization
I have productized many real estate, AEC, and information management services for our clients and ourselves, including assessment processes, homebuyer support, and a business case process for a SaaS provider.
I run these through a five-phase process I call PACED, short for Position, Assemble, Codify, Equip, and Develop. It deserves its own article; the point here is that a framework, whatever you call it, keeps productization disciplined instead of accidental.
So, is Ains Group commoditizing expertise?
Ains Group has not turned engineering into a commodity. It has made a slice of its work easy to buy: assessments and inspections that are repeatable, well-understood, and low in variation. An indoor air quality inspection or a carbon footprint calculation for a renovation project does not demand the same case-by-case negotiation as a structural redesign or a complex renovation project, so putting a fixed price on it costs the firm nothing in expertise and saves the customer real friction.
Productization is not a verdict on the value of your expertise. It is a decision about which parts of your service portfolio behave like a product and which don’t, and Ains Group’s store works because someone there did that sorting first.
Every design process has parts that can be productized, even when the rest of it cannot. Do that sorting in your own practice, and productization stops looking like a threat and starts looking like the strategic decision it is.