What products are hiding in your work?
The Harvest stage is about identifying your product in the work you already do and testing service-to-product fit. Not every service becomes a product. The ones that do share patterns: repeatability, clear boundaries, and customer willingness to pay for the thing rather than the hours.
Stage Objectives
- Create comprehensive inventory of existing IP across all contracts
- Identify patterns that repeat across multiple engagements
- Catalog Process IP, Tool IP, Data IP, and Compliance Assets
- Evaluate candidates with Service-to-Product Fit scoring across six dimensions
- Shortlist 2-5 candidates for the ARCHITECT phase
Key Activities
Contract Archaeology
Systematically excavate intellectual assets buried in your delivery history. Review proposals, delivery interviews, frequency maps, and quick win identification.
IP Classification
Categorize discovered IP into Process IP (methodologies, SOPs), Tool IP (scripts, templates), Data IP (benchmarks, models), and Compliance Assets (SSPs, evidence).
Service-to-Product Fit Scoring
Score candidates across six weighted dimensions. Separate genuine product opportunities from services that should remain services.
Candidate Shortlisting
Select 2-5 candidates from your scoring results to take into the ARCHITECT phase for deep strategic analysis.
Run Harvest as an engagement
The framework is published in full, so you can run Harvest yourself. If you would rather have it done with you, the Harvest Sprint is the engagement that covers it. A findings memo that names your strongest product candidates, scores each one across six dimensions, and ends with a straight answer on whether to act.
The longer treatment is How to productize a government contract.