Products are promises. The teams that build them spend a lot of time finding and naming a pain point that most people have. They build and continuously improve a product that solves that problem most of the time. And they sell it in a straightforward way: “Do 10x more. Burn out less.” “Outpace everyone with the best AI platform.” “Get total portfolio visibility within 30 days.”
These products are successful because the problem is known, the promise is clear, and the results appear predictable and testable. But can you really buy good execution the way you buy laundry detergent? My career hinges on the answer.
The pressure pulling at me is pulling at you, too
I feel real pressure to productize what I do. To package my expertise into something a client can buy off a menu — a fixed scope, a fixed price, a clear promise.
First, I could sell more of it. People like buying promises. Second, the buying cycle would shorten significantly. People take less time to think about purchasing something packaged. Third, I could easily teach other people to deliver it. Products scale. And finally, implementing the same solution over and over again means I’d get really, really good at it.
Then you have the chorus of criticism directed at consultants like me. The main critique, which I think is a fair one, goes like this: “Using a consultant is just paying someone to tell you what your team already tried to.” Sometimes, that’s true. Actually, often that’s true. The same way a doctor’s second opinion is usually consistent with the first.
This was the case with a client who dramatically increased their throughput over the years we worked together. The core idea came from their own team. We gave that team credit, we helped make the idea better, articulated it in a way executives heard, and worked side-by-side to iterate it over time.
Did we make money? Yes. Did we add value? I think so. They think so. But were we welcomed with open arms by the people doing the work? Definitely not at first.
That doesn’t feel super good, and it’s another reason the “get in, get out, repeat” model sounds tempting.
Here’s why I think you should care, even if you’ll never sell a day of consulting in your life. That tension isn’t really about my business. It’s about what happens when buying a solution feels easier than understanding the problem:
- It’s why hiring more PMs feels easier than asking tough questions about prioritization
- It’s why purchasing a new PMIS feels easier than untangling why no one used the old one
- It’s why asking AI to build your PMO strategy is easier than engaging with the tough strategic questions yourself
What links all three is a swap: a thing you can buy standing in for a problem you haven’t finished understanding. And the moment you make that swap, you’ve placed a bet that your read on the problem is right. And I think it’s worth knowing when that bet pays off, and when it doesn’t.
Every product is a bet that you’ve read your problem right.
You’re betting that the pain point the product names is actually your pain point, and that the version of the problem you can articulate is the whole of it. Most of the time, you place that bet without noticing you’ve placed it.
Decision-making is basically educated gambling. No one told me that when I became an executive.
Watching leaders from the front lines, I thought I could clearly see the difference between the “right” decision and a wrong one. Then I learned: there is rarely a clear right choice. Often, you’re just choosing the option that sucks the least.
With every decision you make, there is a cost. Money, time, political capital, employee goodwill, customer satisfaction, etc.
Some executives are comfortable failing fast and often in order to learn. These are the ones who call consultants as a last resort and who want to see a solution before they pay for a diagnosis. Other executives need many people — internal and external — saying the same thing before they’re willing to risk what is at stake. Sometimes that’s because they’re overly cautious. Other times, it’s because they have the humility to know what they don’t know.
Some bets pay off. Others don’t. Losing face stings the most, which is why many leaders try to minimize political risk by keeping costs low enough to stay under the radar. Products and productized offerings are great for that, and often they work.
But just as often, the better bet is on the diagnostician. In my experience, a team’s ability to execute well is shaped by a dynamic network of causes and effects. Changing something over here will impact two things over there. The solution that worked in a fintech company will fall flat in another culture with another structure and different tools.
When you bet on a simple solution to a complex problem, you might have to go through lots of simple solutions before you land on one that alleviates any significant portion of your pain. Each time you do that, you increase change fatigue on your team and lose incremental credibility. (A recent Gartner survey revealed that employees’ willingness to support enterprise change collapsed to just 43% in 2022, compared to 74% in 2016.)
In my experience, PMOs rarely have a “governance problem” or a “prioritization problem” or a “role definition” problem. They often have lots of problems (and strengths) that push and pull on each other in unique ways. Isolating solutions to the one or two that will alleviate the most pain is hard work.
It doesn’t always feel like efficient work. But it’s wise work, whether you do it internally or with someone like me.
You can buy better execution. You also can’t.
I now have a conditional answer to the question of whether you can buy better execution, and it’s one I feel good about.
First, more leaders should take their internal team seriously. These folks see the situation more clearly than you think, even if some struggle to articulate it persuasively. If you seek a second opinion or a product to solve a problem they don’t see, be prepared for both pushback and the possibility you discover (embarrassingly) that they were right all along. If this happens, I recommend fessing up. You’ll gain a lot of credibility by admitting you were wrong.
Second, if you’re going to spend money, products and productized services can absolutely be the better bet. This is especially true when:
- You’re pretty confident you know the problem. Multiple people you trust internally have diagnosed it.
- You don’t already have a track record of buying things that sit on the shelf.
- The cost of failure (or a delay of success) is low.
- You have a plan to test whether it worked.
- You have the time to do it right (i.e., to apply the training, sustain system adoption, commit to the 90-day program).
And third, if you’re trying to solve a wicked, messy, longstanding problem — or you’re taking on a function you don’t yet understand — diagnostic help is a healthy, defensible bet worth the investment.
Here’s the part that’s hard to say without sounding like I’m angling for work, so I’ll just say it plainly:
A good diagnosis is the cheapest expensive thing you’ll buy.
It feels expensive because you’re paying someone to ask questions and share complex truths — nothing is tangible except the diagnosis and prescription.
But what you’re actually buying is the right to skip three wrong solutions before you find the one that works. You’re buying down the change fatigue, the lost credibility, the quarters you’d have spent piloting things that were never going to work.
That math holds as long as you hire someone you’ve met (not just the business development team), someone you trust, and someone with past clients who want to talk to you. The point isn’t who you hire. It’s that on a messy, tangled, expensive problem, understanding it well is the work, and treating that understanding as a line item you can skip is usually the most expensive bet on the table.
If You Only Do One Thing
Before you buy the next solution, ask the people closest to the problem one question: “If we spent this money and it didn’t work, what would the reason be?” If they can answer fast and specifically, you may have already done the diagnosis. If the room goes quiet, you’ve just found out you’re buying a solution to a problem no one has named yet.