Productized service, product, SaaS: why I mostly sell service.

Custom service sells time and judgment, tailored to a specific case. Productized service sells a repeatable outcome, with a clear scope and a legible price. SaaS sells a self-service tool that the client operates alone.

Confusing the three loses everyone. You launch a SaaS when the market is not ready, you bill custom work when a productized deliverable would suffice, you trap a service inside software when the client was paying for the brain behind it.

SaaS fascinates for good reasons: it scales, it builds enterprise value, it runs while you sleep. But it has heavy prerequisites: a homogeneous market, a mature product, continuous support, a promise that holds without an expert present.

For much real value, those conditions are not met, or not yet. Launching a premature SaaS means freezing into software a value that still depended on judgment. You end up with a lukewarm tool that nobody really operates.

This is my zone. A framed deliverable, with a defined scope and a clear price, bringing the judgment of an experienced practitioner without starting from scratch every time. The client is not buying my time by the hour; they are buying an outcome I stand behind.

Productized service has the rigor of a product, repeatable and framed, and the value of a senior human, judgment and adaptation. This is often what serves an executive best: not one more tool to learn, but an outcome delivered and understood.

The classic objection: service does not scale. That used to be true. It is less and less so. A well-orchestrated fleet of agents lets me deliver productized service at a volume a single human could not sustain, without turning my value into impersonal software.

It is the best of both worlds for now: the scalability SaaS was after, without giving up the judgment that makes service valuable. I remain the architect; the agents do the upstream and repetitive work.

The product will come. But it will come when a productized service has proven its repeatability to the point of deserving to be frozen, not before. I am not chasing SaaS; I let it emerge from practice, when the pattern is stable enough to stand on its own.

It is a deliberate stance, and a slightly contrarian one. In a market that pushes you to scale at all costs, I prefer to deliver real value, fast, with fewer hollow promises, and to build the product when it is ripe.

SaaS is not the top of a pyramid. It is one tool among others, with its own conditions and costs. Mistaking it for an inevitability leads people to build software before proving the value.

Selling productized service augmented by agents often means delivering more value, faster, and more honestly. The product will follow, if it must. Not the other way around.