Hi Ravi
Wow - great questions.
- The main mindset change is that you are no longer building for individual clients, you are building what’s best for your business aspirations. When you are a consultancy you do everything your customers ask you to do (more or less). But, your main priority now shifts to the product and that product has to be solving problems for the majority of your customers (or in line with your roadmap) rather than what an individual wants. It’s quite hard when someone says “can you make it do this?” not to respond by doing what they ask. But, actually your product roadmap priorities are much more important. The danger is that you get sidetracked, or spend all of your time and money building something that only one customer cares about.
- By learning to say ‘no’. By explaining that you can’t do consultancy and that you are thankful for their ideas and it will be discussed at the next product planning meeting and when you have more news about whether or when it will be incorporated, you will let them know. You could also split out a separate Pro Services team, but you have to separate out recurring revenue from non-recurring project based revenue. Don’t fudge the two and focus primarily on building the recurring element!
- Not sure! I guess exactly as you say: if you want to scale it is impossible to ‘paper over the gaps’ with manual services. The company has a choice: do they want to stay where they are or do they want to scale. If they want to scale, you need to build a scaleable product and go to market process.