Speaker: Stephan Malherbe, Chair and CEO, Genesis
What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with Vecteris?
Stephan Malherbe: The main challenge that our company Genesis is facing is one that I believe is universal to virtually all consulting companies in the world right now. and that is how do we continue to deliver value and to help our clients in the context of ubiquitous AI that will really take care of a lot of the bread and butter analytical work that's been done by firms like ourselves over many years in many different situations and markets. And this is where Vecteris comes in because the short answer we believe is for firms like ourselves to be a lot more proactive going into the market, finding areas of value, and delivering that value to our clients. And one way of doing that is products, products have a lot of advantages that I don't need to go into now. If you're watching this video, you will probably have a sense of why products can really be important receptacles if you wish of IP ongoing learning incredible efficiencies and therefore ultimately incredibly good value for clients, but also good value for firms like ourselves from a business perspective. The real problem though that we faced was that we had no idea how to do it, no idea how to do products, no idea how to conceptualize our products, how to change our IP into, something that one could sell on a unitized basis, how to go to the market. And in between those steps, how do we find out, you know, what the market really want, what it would be prepared to pay. So long story short, we needed Vecteris to help us with all of that.
Could you describe how the Vecteris Productize Pathway® helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?
Stephan Malherbe: The Vecteris Productize Pathway is a really smart way to embody all the learning that Vecteris brings to these these processes. And where we really had an incredible challenge was not with the visioning of what we thought our services could do. We were really looking at at two elements. The one was a large health surveys to productize that. and we do these surveys across Africa and indeed across the entire young world. But secondly, also, and this is a second product, a tool for getting governments to figure out how to spend their money better, particularly on social services. And that we've done in a traditional consulting way in countries in the Middle East as well as in North Africa. And we wanted to productize that. So we had a lot of challenges that we needed help with. And the Productize Pathway really showed the way for us how to make that more concrete. First and foremost, we had to understand what the market really wants. What's the problem that we are solving for? Is it urgent? Is it important? Is it costly? And then to really get us to speak to our clients in a disciplined way about important things such as price points as well as getting a sense of how we could ultimately go to market. So these have been the areas on which we've worked most closely with Vecteris and their fantastic team, people like Jaime, Molly, JeiLi, and Jason to really get to the bottom of a step by step approach that even a product engineers like ourselves could use.
What has been the most significant impact of working with Vecteris?
Stephan Malherbe: There's been quite a number of impacts from working with Vecteris, and I think the best is yet to come. But the ones that I want to point out right now happened early on already, firstly, just gave us a lot more clarity about how to run this part of our business. And secondly, it gave us confidence, confidence that we can actually change our consulting bespoke activities into either productized services or into products. And that means that it's opened the door to a whole bunch of new business opportunities for us, the ones that we are working on directly with Vecteris, but also ones that we see coming down the line in other parts of our business. Suddenly we have a language to talk about products. We understand what makes them succeed and fail. We understand what the steps are to develop them using the Productize Pathway. And in that journey, our hand is held quite effectively and sometimes quite firmly by Vecteris. Vecteris has really been a good partner to us in this honest, constructive, clear firm, and expert. I also think that that I should mention and maybe this is not intended to be a part of the package, but it's also made us more successful at our core consulting business. Some of these products have landed in their first incarnation as quite big consulting gigs that we will use in a twofold manner. One to do that work and to earn that money, but also to use it to really develop the products that we want to take more broadly into the market that would not have happened. Had we not been in a more disciplined frame of mind working, working with Vecteris going down the Productize Pathway.
