Turning an internal system into something you sell. It works because your people know how to run it. A customer won't.
It works. It has worked for years. It works because the people using it know how it works - they built the process, they know the exceptions, they know which field means what.
A customer knows none of that. The gap between those two things is a product-architecture problem, and it's the reason internal systems rarely productise cleanly.
What usually turns out not to be decided
- What the product assumes the user already knows. One executive put it plainly: if I handed this to you and said start using it, you wouldn't know how - it's just too complex.
- What is one product and what is several. Features that grew inside the system often turn out to be their own product surface once someone outside has to configure them.
- Which parts can be turned on and off, for which kind of customer.
- What the system does that's a decision, and what it does that's an accident nobody revisited.
Everything that makes an internal system efficient - implicit knowledge, workarounds, conventions held in people's heads - is exactly what stops it being sellable. You can't design your way out of it at the interface layer. The structure has to be decided first.
According to these figures, you’re losing about
$
a month
Book a fit call
What happens next:
- Fit call - We learn about your product and your situation. If it's not a fit, we'll tell you.
- Pilot - 2 weeks, $10,000 fixed. The question it answers: what have we not decided yet? We close the two or three most expensive gaps - named, dated, approved by your people. You see exactly how we work before committing to anything larger.
- Full engagement - scoped by product area. Every structural decision closed, the model they rest on - entities, relationships, states, lifecycle rules, dependency order - and a prototype of the target state.
