Transformation Labs
Deliver Great Products, Not Just Projects

Bill Campbell, a Silicon Valley luminary, and former CEO of Intuit and VP of Marketing at Apple famously stated “Great companies start with great products”.

But how do you consistently build great products (and services) that capture market share, increase competitive advantage, drive growth, and deliver customer delight?

There are systematic ways to create great products, and Transformation Labs help their clients instill those practices into their organizations.

Saeed Khan, Founder of Transformation Labs, says: “More companies today stress on rapid delivery. However, focusing just on speed might lead to building the wrong product. You need to go slow before you can go fast”

Why? Because great products require deep understanding of customer and market needs. That takes time, effort, and focus. But once you have that understanding and insight, it acts like jet fuel—accelerating your development and go-to-market activities.

Transformation Labs is an advisory and consulting firm that applies years of experience in high-technology product innovation to guide companies on how to build great products and great product organizations. They do this through a combination of mentoring, coaching, workshops and consulting.

The company helps clients understand the right approach to perform effective customer research and find deep insights that drive innovation. They also help clients take those insights to create strong product strategies, roadmaps, as well as product and go-to-market plans. The clients can create efficient product teams and organizations that align product and business objectives. This combination leads to building great products that win in the market.

For Transformation Labs, the client engagement usually starts by understanding their objectives, needs and issues. The company assesses the client’s product processes, detects shortcomings, and recommends actions to improve them. Engagements can be short and focused, (e.g. a workshop on product discovery followed by mentoring and coaching) or longer and broader (implement product management in a company, implementing key processes and helping in initial hiring).

Our goal is to partner with companies and help them transform their organizations and processes to deliver great product outcomes; this not only helps them succeed in the short-term, but sets them up for long term, sustainable market success

One customer, Poka Inc, a Canadian software provider for manufacturing companies struggled to communicate the true value of their product to the market. Transformation Labs conducted an executive workshop and research with customers and partners. They analyzed the results and crafted new messaging that focused on Poka’s core value to their customers. "Transformation Labs quickly became trusted advisors, helping us refine our product messaging and understand what our buyers really care about," said Andrea Masterson, Vice-President Marketing, Poka Inc.

Another client, a mid-sized US internet infrastructure company, was having difficulty delivering software releases on time and on budget. The client tried to resolve the problems themselves but was unsuccessful. They then engaged Transformation Labs. By interviewing over 30 members of the IT teams and conducting online surveys, Transformation Labs found multiple issues in the application process, including requirements gathering, task estimation, prioritization, project scoping and change management. Fifteen high level recommendations were made, including changing the strategy from being project-focused to product-focused. Transformation Labs worked with the client for a year to oversee their implementation. Subsequently, another assessment was done that showed clear improvement in more than 80 percent of the problem areas.

Khan says, “Our goal is to partner with companies and help them transform their organizations and processes to deliver great product outcome; this not only helps them succeed in the short-term, but sets them up for long term, sustainable market success.”

And which CIO doesn’t want that?