I was on maternity leave with my seven-month-old baby when the idea arrived. I was out for a morning run, and suddenly it was just there, complete: a DIY legal service for entrepreneurs. Modular legal documents, automated, with a clear process and plain-language guidance so business owners could actually understand what they were doing.
I had been building toward it for years without realizing it. The standardized processes, the intake questionnaires, my obsession with making legal language understandable: all the little things I'd created because I wanted legal services to work better for the humans using them. I just hadn't known they could become a product. I didn't even know legal tech was a thing, or that there was an entire world of people rethinking how legal services could be delivered. I only knew I could see the thing in my head, and I wanted it to exist.
There's a name for what I'd built: a productized service. I'd taken something I knew how to do well and given it edges. It had a scope and a price, and a process that didn't depend on how much sleep I'd had. Something a stranger could buy at 2 a.m. without ever talking to me.
There was also a much more personal reason. I wanted more time with my baby. I wanted to serve my clients well without every euro of revenue requiring another hour of me. So I hired a developer to build it, for €10,000. On maternity leave, with money tight, that felt like an absolute fortune. Honestly, I was a little embarrassed telling people what I was doing. What if they thought I was crazy? What if I'd just spent €10,000 building something nobody wanted? Still, I wanted to find out.
I launched in September 2015, and I still remember the morning I knew it had worked. I was standing in my kitchen with my son, who never napped and never really let me sleep either, when my phone buzzed. A payment notification. A stranger had just bought the thing I'd built while I was busy with the sweet potato mash he so loved. I stopped wondering whether legal expertise could become a product. Standing at that kitchen counter, I started wondering how big it could get.
From One Productized Service to a Global Legal Tech Company
I remember sitting with my business coach dreaming about ridiculous numbers: scaling, going global, taking over the world, obviously. 😂 Somewhere in those conversations I realized something very practical. I couldn't do it alone.
Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited has names for what happened next. I'd been a Technician for years, the one who does the work. The run woke up my Entrepreneur, the part that sees what could be. And building a company meant my inner Manager had to show up fast, ready or not. For many of us, especially women, the Entrepreneur is the part we were taught to keep small.
So I picked up the phone. Asking before I feel ready has shaped most of my entrepreneurial life since. I called an old colleague and told her about this slightly wild idea. She got excited, excited enough to eventually leave her corporate job and build it with me. We co-founded Contract Mill in 2016. What had begun as one lawyer on maternity leave wondering whether legal expertise could work differently became a born-global legal SaaS startup, automating document creation so that other lawyers didn't have to build their own automation from scratch, and people without deep pockets could get legally solid contracts without breaking the bank.
There were investors, first an angel investor who came on board, and later bigger investors. There were wonderfully audacious conversations, cold approaches, and people saying yes when we had no way of knowing beforehand that they would. Pitching to potential clients with nothing but a slide deck and big hopes. There were also all the things startup stories tend to edit out when they're told backwards: the uncertainty, the mistakes, the things that didn't work, the demos that failed, the learning curve.
But the company grew. The idea pivoted along the way, and in 2019 I made a successful six-figure exit. After I sold my share, my co-founder continued to grow it even bigger. Kudos to her. And all of it began with an idea that arrived on a morning run when my baby was seven months old.
There's a lot of advice out there that says: three packages, good-better-best, done. That's a menu with nothing in the kitchen. I've lived what can happen when you take expertise that supposedly has to be bespoke and start asking what else it could become.
So What Does It Actually Mean to Productize a Service?
A productized service is expertise with edges. It solves one named problem, follows the same process every time, and has a price you could put on a website. You stop starting from zero with each new client and start improving one thing instead.
Think of a good restaurant. You don't walk into the kitchen, describe your cravings and wait while the chef runs to the market and invents an entirely new dish for you. You're handed a menu. The dishes have names, you know roughly what you're getting, and you know what they cost. The creativity is still there. It just happened before you sat down.
Your expertise deserves that kind of thinking too. It makes you findable. If your offer only exists as "whatever the client needs," nobody can search for it, and the people who need you most have no way to recognize that you're the one who can help.
This is service design, and it's too often neglected. Everyone fusses over the offer's name and price, and how pretty it'll look on the website. But what about the container underneath? The container is what decides whether you still enjoy delivering it in year three.
Back then, everyone insisted B2B legal advice couldn't be productized through automation. Legal advice, apparently, is the most bespoke thing there is. I didn't believe that, and I don't believe it about your work either. My next business, Lawyers Design School, went from custom workshops to a fixed format with a clear promise, a teaching framework, a set process, and simplified tools. Selling "design thinking for lawyers" would've been too generic, so instead I offered packaged trainings like one-day Legal Design Bootcamp.
Before You Build Anything, Talk to Real People
Before this starts sounding like one of those founder stories where every decision was obviously brilliant in hindsight, let me tell you about the product I built before that. In 2013, I created a digital legal service called contract maintenance. I registered the trademark, bought the domain, and perfected the service and the brand. I did everything except the rather important thing of asking potential customers what they actually needed. The response was lukewarm, at best.
I didn't magically know how to build products. I learned by getting it wrong in 2013, then listening and trying again. When I later taught service design to lawyers, this was the mistake I saw most often, and I'd made it first.
Designers have a simple picture for this, a classic design thinking model called the Double Diamond, from the UK Design Council. The first diamond is the problem; the second is the solution. Lawyers, me included, love the second diamond. We're trained to have the answer before the client finishes her sentence.
So before you shape anything, have three to five conversations (designers call them customer interviews). They don't need to be with current clients. Talk to people who've bought something like your service, and people who chose not to. Offer coffee. Ask for their story rather than their opinion of your idea: what happened, what frustrated them, how they wish it had gone. Listen for the moment their voice changes.
For example, I first planned to sell legal design as a consultancy. The lawyers I interviewed told me they didn't want me to do legal design for them; they wanted to learn it themselves. That's how the consultancy idea became a global learning platform, Lawyers Design School. I'd never have known that on my own.
Write your notes straight after each conversation, while they're still warm. By the fourth or fifth, you'll start hearing the same thing in different words.
The Four Steps to Productizing Your Services
I use the same four-step process whether I'm helping a founder shape her first offer or reworking my own. It works for coaching, creative services, consulting, product-based businesses — anything built on your expertise.
1. Focus
Stop trying to serve everyone with everything. If you've been doing this work a while, look back over the last few months: what's the one problem you keep solving, for different people, in roughly the same way? If you're just starting out, ask it differently: of everything you know how to do, what's the one problem you could solve in your sleep, the one people already come to you for advice on? Either way, that's the signal. It's the first sign of a product; you just haven't named it yet.
Two more places to look, both borrowed from Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. First, look outside your own field. Most industries quietly copy themselves, so a fresh offer rarely comes from studying the people who already do exactly what you do. Ask instead how a good hotel welcomes a guest, or how a midwife walks someone through the unknown. Second, listen to the people who don't buy from your field at all. Their reasons for staying away are the most precise brief you'll ever get.
2. Standardize
Write down what you actually do. The questions you ask on a first call. The steps between "yes" and "delivered." Where does most of the work look the same client to client, and where are you customizing out of habit rather than necessity? From there, build a simple intake in plain language, with no professional jargon your client has to decode. Explain your concepts the way you'd explain them to a smart friend outside your field, not a peer inside it. If you need the word "indemnify", you've already lost her.
3. Automate
Once the shape is proven with a few real clients, look at what can run without you doing it live each time, templates, questionnaires, scheduling, the first draft of a deliverable. Automation doesn't mean removing yourself from the work. A short human touchpoint — a call, a voice note, a quick review — is often what makes an automated offer feel personal instead of impersonal. Keep that part.
4. Document: Map Your Client’s Journey
Map the whole journey your client moves through, step by step, including the parts that happen behind the scenes. This map becomes the backbone of the offer. One day it's also the thing you hand to someone else.
A client journey map (often called a customer journey map) is this, made visible: your client's whole experience with you, laid out on a timeline from her point of view rather than yours. Split it into three phases. Before: everything that happens before you meet (the worry, the searching, the first email). During: the work itself, and every touchpoint along the way, from calls and drafts to voice notes and invoices. After: what she's left holding once you've finished.
Here's a simple customer journey map example. Picture a coach with a 90-day program. Before: her future client lies awake wondering whether coaching is even for someone like her, reads two blog posts, and finally books a call. During: the welcome email, the first session, the worksheet between sessions, the quiet week when motivation dips. After: the final session, and then silence, unless the coach has designed what comes next. Mapped this way, the dip in week six and the silence at the end become obvious places for a voice note or a follow-up.
In a workshop in Brussels in 2021, a general counsel leading a large Europe-wide legal team said it so well: "While we're working on the document or doing legal research, the customer is… just waiting. Have we ever thought about how we might tell them how the case is progressing on our end?"
Someone in almost every room had the same quiet a-ha: the client's journey looked nothing like the steps we took to deliver the service, and nobody had ever looked at that part. Two rules keep the map honest. Don't assume. You are not your client, so fill the map from what real people told you in those first conversations. And write every improvement idea straight onto the map, so insight turns into change instead of staying a nice afternoon.
The Four-Question Product Test
Before you build anything new, run your current work through this:
Frequency — Are you solving a version of the same problem for multiple people?
Process — If you mapped the steps, would most cases follow a similar path?
Price — Can you predict, with reasonable confidence, what a typical case takes?
Clarity — Can you describe the result in one or two plain sentences?
Mostly yeses? Then you already have a product. You just haven't put a price on it yet.
What a Scalable Business Really Means
Productization doesn't automatically mean you need investors, employees or a global SaaS company. That happened to be where my experiment eventually led. Your version of scale might simply mean serving ten people together instead of ten separately, creating a repeatable consulting process, turning part of your expertise into a digital product, or designing a business that doesn't stop earning the moment you close your laptop. Why sell your clients time, when what they're really buying is a result?
For me, a scalable business meant one thing: my income stopped being a timesheet.
A client of mine once told me that productizing would turn her into a vending machine, when her value lay in the most personal, luxurious version of her service. I understand the fear. But luxury can have edges too. The way I see it, a defined product protects your energy for the parts of the work that genuinely need you, like the strategic thinking and the relationship. You built something real through years of doing this work one client at a time. Productizing it means finally writing down what you already know how to do, so more of the right people can find it.
The Part I Didn’t Have Language for Yet
The idea that later became Contract Mill didn't arrive in a strategy session. It arrived while I was running, complete enough that I could see what I wanted to build before I knew there was an industry called legal tech waiting for me. Back then, I wouldn't have called that business intuition. Today I would. (I've written more about that run, and the career crossroads around it, in Golden Handcuffs.)
But intuition didn't build the company on its own. We had to test the idea, talk to people, invest money, design the service, learn what didn't work, ask for help, build a team and make the slightly terrifying phone calls.
When a woman comes to me at a business crossroads, we look at the spreadsheet and the signal. What do your customers actually need, and what does the evidence say? Then come the questions I'd never have asked as a lawyer. What do you know that you can't prove yet? What keeps tugging at you? What's yours to build? Which of these would you still want to be doing in five years?
Service design and strategy have helped me build businesses. Intuition is how I knew they were worth building. That's what I work with now, and it's what my doctoral research is about. If you'd like to start practicing, I've written about how to improve your intuition.
A Gentle Next Step
If this stirred something, a "maybe there's already a product hiding inside what I do" feeling, I'd start smaller than you think. A discovery call with me is a free, honest place to begin: a friendly conversation to figure out your next step. And if you're standing at a bigger pivot, ready to build the fuller shape of your next chapter, that's exactly the terrain Strategy by Soul was built for.
Just an invitation to look at what you already have differently.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to "productize" a service? Productizing means turning a service you currently deliver one client at a time into a defined offer (a clear scope, a repeatable process and a fixed price), so clients know exactly what they're buying before they buy it.
Can any service-based business be productized? Most can, at least in part. Even highly bespoke or creative work usually has a recurring problem underneath it that can be shaped into a product, even if some elements stay custom.
Is productizing the same as niching down? No. Niching down narrows who you serve. Productizing changes how you deliver, turning your process itself into something structured and repeatable, regardless of how broad or narrow your niche is.
How is this different from just packaging or naming my offer? A name and a price alone aren't a product. Productizing means the underlying delivery process is actually standardized (the intake, the steps, the deliverable), not just the marketing wrapper around it.
What is a client journey map? A client (or customer) journey map is a timeline of your client's whole experience with you (before, during and after the service), seen from her point of view. It shows where the client experience feels smooth, where it feels confusing, and where a product could make it simpler.
Should I talk to clients before I productize? Yes. A handful of honest conversations with the people you want to serve, including people who chose not to buy, will tell you more than months of planning on your own.