From Services to Product: How We Transformed Our Business

WHY THIS TOPIC:

Building products is hard.

Is there a market for my product? Do customers care about this problem – at scale – that is worth creating a business around? Once we’ve identified a need, how do we mobilize our team and orient our business to deliver on the opportunity? How do we know when to double down or just go with an MVP? Once we have customers, how does one prioritize what to work on? How do we organize and optimize the product management function?

In this conversation, Grant will share his company’s experience becoming product-focused after 12 years of being a services company.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• How we leveraged our strengths as a services business to accelerate product-market fit
• Insights and hard fought lessons learned from the services to product transition – and why we almost failed
• How we created the right-sized structures and processes for the current stage of the transition to product
• The top “if you can do it all over, how would you have done it differently?” insights.

YOU MIGHT ENJOY THIS IF YOU ARE:

• a services business looking to either replace or augment your offerings with product
• a product company that is interested in how other companies build their product

Grant Gochnauer is co-founder and CTO of Vodori, a SaaS content management solutions provider to Life Sciences manufacturers. As an entrepreneur, a technologist, and chief product architect, he has led the commercialization of Vodori’s enterprise product portfolio working across customer and product R&D while supporting sales and marketing efforts, partnerships, and pricing. Grant is also an advisor to Northwestern’s NUVentionWeb entrepreneurship program, a mentor at Junto Institute, serves on the investment committee with PurpleArch Ventures, and an active Chicago angel investor. He holds a BA in Computer Information Systems from Northwestern University.