Choosing the initial product offering
In our exploratory customer discussions this year we have tried to be strategic in prioritising our scope. The main criteria we have based our evaluation on are:
- Value: what are the key pain points for professional services organisations?
- Stickiness: which functions will give us access to our golden sources of context and allow us to create virality?
- Risk: which functions are invasive - either in terms of functions that business owners feel strong ownership of and/or the client experience (i.e. that of our customers' clients).
- Achievability: Which functions might prevent us launching our early access programme as planned.
Based on the above, we can plot our planned functionality on a little 2x2 (classic consulting!), and see where the quick wins are (hint: they're in the bottom left quadrant).
The conclusion is that we should launch with Payments and Benefits (which is what we are doing) and then move North East through the diagram above. Although prof services business all have their own pain-points, there are two universally reviled processes: expenses and timesheets.
- Expenses is eminently addressable - and makes the most of the Folio card. It has also polled well during our Initial Beta.
- Benefits is a bit of an extension of this - and was also a big winner in our Initial Beta.
- Timesheets, however, is logically part of the Teams capability (although we reserve the right to change this all up) and is currently tied up with a bunch of other functionality that is higher risk and complexity. We're itching to address this ASAP, but won't just yet.
In adidition ,there are many prof services organisations who use point solutions (or inadequate solutions) for these functions, meaning that we can fully replace their existing systems, delivering a reduction in subscription costs as well as the underlying cost-benefit of shifting to an agentic approach.
Finally, these use cases provide a simple way for us to unlock access to the '6 golden sources of context' that we will need to solve virtually ALL problems in prof services operations:
