How to become an Product Intrapreneur

Productising the service offering of your company

Many have heard of entrepreneurship, but intrapreneurs are a concept that is becoming more common as large organisations begin to expand their innovation centres. Like their entrepreneur counterparts, intrapreneurs are tasked with developing innovative ideas or projects for an organisation that they work for. They are given the time and freedom to develop the project as an entrepreneur would, and have access to the resources and capabilities, while not facing the same level of risks as an entrepreneur going it alone.

Intrapreneurs may often already exist in an organisation in disguise. Product owners and managers are common intrapreneurs, often driving the growth of the product offering in a similar way that entrepreneurs develop their products. These roles often set product vision and strategy, understand customer needs and gather requirements, generate and vet ideas for new products and features, define roadmaps and prioritise backlogs to deliver on these ideas.

In a rapidly changing external environment, it's becoming more important for organisations to embrace intrapreneurship to accelerate innovation. There are a number of ways that many organisations incentivise intrapreneurship that can kickstart your journey. These include:

• Hackathons are one-off events where teams are tasked with solving a specific problem using rapid design methods.

• Sandbox funds allocate money for employees to invest in building out prototypes or business plans;

• Innovation time (often associated with Google's "20% time") offers employees the option to spend some time on side projects of their choosing.

• Productisation of existing services, which can be internal or client-facing services. We'll dive into this in a second as this is often the easiest way to add value and become an intrapreneur by creating a new product out of service.

What is productisation and how can we do this?

Many service offerings often involve working closely with clients to create custom solutions to solve their needs. Productisation takes an entirely different approach where instead of creating unique solutions for each engagement, we can create a single solution relying on the same process.

Services differ from products in that they often involve an activity or process, are intangible, time-bound, and are consumed at the same time they are produced and distributed. Conversely, products are more concrete, and tangible, with production and distribution often separated from consumption. Productised service offerings straddle between products and services, taking elements from both.

Services can be turned into products simply by breaking down the service into specific tasks performed, through a specific process. For example, in-house security assurance services can be converted into products by highlighting the tasks they perform, such as security recommendations for a specific system, code reviews, and penetration testing to name a few. These services are done through a specific process, such as an email request which initiates a scoping exercise before the team executes their service and finally returns a report or other delivered outcome. Client-facing services can also provide predictable pricing plans, and all this makes for a predictable and effective productised service offering.

Intrapreneurship and service productisation can be key enablers for innovation to develop services and revenue and allows for proven product management methods and principles to be applied to your newly productised service offerings.

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https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/intrapreneurship-explained

https://www.consultingsuccess.com/consultants-guide-to-productization