Our most valuable IP now takes 45 seconds to copy

On a call last week I showed a client our library of product management skills: strategy, ideation, discovery, prototyping, testing, beta. A year of learning from running product for an ASX-listed business, encoded so that a product manager with no experience can operate like a good one.

Then I said what everyone already knew. Run a filter over it with your brand and your context and in 45 seconds it is yours. The client's reaction: "quite scary how fast it is."

Consultancies have spent decades charging for artifacts. Frameworks, templates, playbooks, decks. The artifact is now free. Anyone with a transcript and a model can produce ours by Friday.

So where does the value live? Three places, as far as I can tell.

Judgement about what to work on, which gets more valuable the faster the build gets.

The ability to make change stick in a room full of people who feel threatened by it, because tooling does not resolve that.

And measurement that proves it worked, against a baseline nobody else bothered to take.

None of those fit in a template. All of them are what clients are actually buying from us.

If you are buying transformation services, ask the vendor what happens to their value when you own the artifacts. If they cannot answer, they are selling you the templates.

We are still working this out ourselves at Propel. More honestly than most!