From custom builds to a product you configure

Clients signed, and no product yet.

That was WinView at the start: B2B in regulated industries, packaging reviews from marketing to print, and very different needs from one client to the next.

If you give each one what they need, you end up with a custom build per client. And that's expensive to set up.

Sales had its own bottleneck: a 70-page contract. With that on the table, closing was hard. And every new client was a project. Projects don't scale.

I started by running discovery with the clients we had already signed, looking for what they had in common. That gave us a base product that could serve very different needs.

The big decision was changing the model. We dropped custom builds and moved to productised customisation: what used to be coded for one client became an option in the product.

The contract went the same way: a 3-page order form.

Then came the implementations. At one point I was running more than 10 at once: technical setup, training and follow-up.

I also audited the platform so it could be rebuilt.

• Base product: what every client shares, however different they are.

• Productised customisation: you configure it, you don't code it.

• Order form: if the product is configured, the contract can be short too.

• Implementation: every implementation starts from the same product, so you can run several at once.

Setup became 66% cheaper.

More than 20 clients in production, and implementations at companies with a turnover of more than 300 million.

With the order form, the sales cycle got noticeably shorter.

You negotiate seventy pages. You sign three.