A service development process with a strategy

Since vacation time is around the corner, the office is becoming emptier by the day and the general business life in Sweden slows down quite a bit. Because of that, it has been a relatively calm week at iGoMoon, except for the board meeting some days ago that Mattias wants to talk about some more.

SDP challenges for small growing companies

One of the most important topics that were discussed during that board meeting was the service development process. Mattias starts off by explaining that, as a small and growing business, it is very easy to end up developing your services inside the sales process. In one way that is the right way to do this because you really pay attention to what your customers want and create individual services for them.

In iGoMoon's case, however, this approach led to an owner/partner silo, where Mattias and his business partner Erik would gather the latest outcomes around their services and processes somewhere hidden in their head or a document on the drive. This owner/partner silo is quite common under these circumstances because the owners or partners of a small company are usually very involved in the sales process.

Some symptoms of such a silo could be:

1. The quote is the only real product documentation

2. Important documents end up somewhere where only the people inside the silo know about

3. There's no proper training or onboarding around the services and processes to actually deliver the new services

4. There's no product owner attached to the service that is being developed

5. There's no information about the new services on the website

Strategically approaching the SDP

During the board meeting this week they were discussing new ways to solve problems like silos around the service development process. Mattias wants to share parts of their new strategy, whenever having listened to their client and proceeding to create a new service for them:

1. Document the technical specifications and information (what and how to deliver it) and announce a specific owner for that

2. Onboarding and training of the different departments

3. The launch (updating the website with the new services, marketing campaigns around the new products/services, new sales presentations for the sales team)

After this initial service development process the sales- and marketing- as well the delivery team can take over.

💡 EPISODE TAKE AWAY
Make sure there are concrete owners for all the different stages in the service development process.

How does your service development process look?