 Thank you. Thank you B for the nice introduction. So today I'm going to be covering this this topic how to go from projects to products and your clients website project should be approached as a product that's my main thesis for today and I see many clients and agencies you know they see a website as a one-off and in fact it's not a one-off there's there's a lot of ongoing concerns we need we need to have in mind so what we're going to be talking today is I'm going to be covering why value is in the high in the eye of the beholder what does it mean to approach a website as a product why is it important I'll then compare traditional projects website building projects versus approaching them as products so we understand the differences and then I'll share free case studies and also free key principles in order to make this work in our experience and then final notes and conclusion so before I get into the material I would like to share a small story with you which is my friend Joanne she got into a family fight a few years ago her grandmother had just passed away so it was very sad a very sad moment and in that moment in that time one of the things they had to do as a family after her passing was you know go through all of her grandmother's things and stuff that she had at home and decide what things to keep what things to throw away what what to do with those things so it was a very serious and sad moment and during that time my friend she found an embroidery I think that's that's the way you say it it's a handmade thing like like this one but the one she found was very very old okay almost a hundred years old and it was very dusty and no one in the family gave it any value you know it didn't seem to have any value at that time but because it was her grandmother she took it she started cleaning it she put it on a nice frame and she hanged it on the wall at her house so what happened next is the real kicker because when her family went to her house and saw it on the wall they all started oh that's really nice I want that for me so this is a story that illustrates something very important which is value is something that is perceived it's not actual reality it's it's a perception and as a perception it can be influence and this is something very important for us to understand as WordPress professionals when we speak to clients and when we sell services so what does it mean to approach a website build as a product for me it comes down to this formula which is essentially agile development and that means working with an open-ended scope on a monthly retainer it means doing user-centered design dotted driven decisions and client deep dives and I'm going to explain what I mean by by those but first I want to explain why I came up with this formula in the first place the first reason is a website is no longer just that you know for many businesses a website is an essential tool it's going to deliver results is going to impact the business so it's really important that we don't approach it as a one-off but we keep doing continuous improvements we keep monitoring it we keep improving it over time the second reason is I wanted to grow my own WordPress agency and essentially one-off projects plus maintenance plans or support packages isn't really a scalable way to grow an agency so retainers is a much better approach for for growth as as an agency so that was a reason as well and just a quick rundown of the numbers here you can see if imagine a year you're doing 15 projects on an average 50,000 K project you'll do a revenue of 225 K let's imagine next year you want to grow so you aim to do 20 projects at 20 K okay 400 K that's pretty interesting but there's effort in that in that jump already but let's say you have 15 clients at 3500 per month and you actually cut the project in half so you don't need to stop doing projects completely but now you have this ongoing retainers with 15 other clients and suddenly you're almost close to a million so it's quite a different business model right if you want to take a picture and I think a lot of WordPress professionals are leaving money on the table but by not understanding this the fourth reason is by approaching a website as a product and working alongside with the client on an ongoing basis you get to go from just a vendor to really being a partner and that that's where you want to be that thought strategic partner that helps you that understands your business so that when the client thinks oh I actually have a cheaper vendor here that I could go work with okay but these guys they really understand my business I mean I've been with them for so long they know exactly our pain points how we work our challenges our team etc it's really a hassle to change and lastly I also wanted to increase team satisfaction it's very important today in the current market to retain talent and something I saw we had many happy clients over the years but when working on projects you know towards the end of the project there's always bug fixing and stressing with deadlines and all kinds of things that kind of leave the team on a low point rather than on a high you know and so that was a concern as well and we're going to see how using this approach you actually increase team satisfaction so how does it work and how does it compare to a traditional project well very simply before a project you know you plan and and maybe you create a specification of what's involved in building the website how many pages it's going to be etc you kind of do an estimation of the work involved you do a budget so you can present it to the client or maybe internally but the risk is really all on you because if you miss that estimate if it's wrong you're going to lose money now before approaching if we approach it as a product we're going to do it differently so first we start by doing a discovery session and preparation meetings with the client and those are paid meetings we start by estimating what resources we need to put on on the development instead of estimating work we're really estimating okay how many developers how many front-end developers how many back-end developers so it's it's a different approach and we just need to share our rate card or our price for those resources we're not doing gases or on what the price should be so it's some it's a monthly fee for those resources and that's it nothing more so it's not inflated and the risk is really shared between us and the client as it should be because at the end it's their product we're building so during the project it's also very different you know during a project you have a frozen feature set we cannot put more things into without at least without charging extra sometimes people do inflated budgets to to account for this risk but it's really never there's there's no magic formula to get it right and the incentive is really do it as fast as possible so we can earn more money instead of let's build the best thing we can build and of course we use project management tools like gun charts ticketing etc if we approach it as a product we can always add new features from month to month from release to release we can prioritize and add new things it's based on time and materials so it's based on iterations and the incentive is really build the best thing possible right we're not stressed by by the time itself and we use product improvement tools you know like heat maps like user voice interviews so we get feedback and we can improve the website after it's also very different on a project basis we kind of tend to celebrate the launch like it's a big milestone but it's actually I find that to be a misleading practice because imagine you develop a new product and you put it on the shelf and you're celebrating but then no one grabs the product from the shelf is that really a success I'm not sure right but we tend to do that with websites normally there's a warranty period perhaps you have one and then we sell maintenance packages to clients and success here is really measured by delivering on time on budget on quality that's how typically projects are evaluated if we approach it as a product it's very different we're releasing every week or every month we're adding new things we're adding improvements there's similar seamless continuity with existing systems so we don't break what's what's there already and we can even schedule spring cleanings meaning we can clean technical depth we can refactor code we can you know delete those unused plugins etc etc right we don't need to be rushing all the time and success here needs to be measured by the adoption in the market of what we're building that's really the end goal to have more users and happy users so how do we sell this type of ongoing collaboration to clients I think that that's a really important question because you know not all clients will be right for this type of approach not all clients will be ready for it as well but I think there's there's a few important points the first one is education we need to educate the user and the client about the value we bring to the table and how important the website will be and how important the ongoing aspect of this collaboration is in his own view right we need to put ourselves in his shoes the other one is framing right so framing has to do with the words we choose how we appear to the client where we meet him you know our sales pitch our presentation that's all a frame that will help the client see us as low value or high value and we really want to be on this end and then also social proof here it could be a video testimonial it could be even a call with one of our clients explaining to a potential client how it is working with us but that's really strong of course there's other ways but here though here's a few ideas on the WordPress space I see also a lot of clients that see WordPress work as low value I'm not sure if you've come across those I'm sure you have sometimes they see WordPress developers almost as factory workers they're there 80 hours a day coding away and we're just going to pay them to do some stuff and the sad part is even some agencies they see developers that way as well as factory workers and we're really not factory workers we're creative problem solvers we're solving problems for the business and a developer can solve a problem so important for the business that maybe the business 10x its value right so that's what we have to understand so some examples some case studies for you to to understand what I'm speaking about for example approaching a news media news publishing website as a product what have we done here we've made had preparation sessions with the client we prepared the roadmap we defined how many resources are going to be on the development side and we even moved on site with the client so this is actually a photo of the team in the client office in their office we spend there a few months of course this was pre-pandemic now we would have to to find another way to be close to them but this was really a feeling of okay we're working on more than just a project it's really a product the way we're working and this is where it all started to come clear of this way of working is different so a first principle I think is very important is doing client deep dives and this is not just meeting with the client but also gathering in-depth information about them learning about their goals their needs doing market analysis competitive analysis all those things and especially being very close to the sea level and to executives because what we've seen is when when you use this type of approach it's normal that clients stay with you for many years and if you're only interacting with the project manager or the CTO on their side most likely those people over the years will leave and and other people will come so you need to stay in contact really with the sea level so you you keep that strategic partnership up a second case study is an e-commerce as a product we approached fresh land an e-commerce startup in in Denmark really we we approach them as as a product and this is our git commit punch card you can see the weekly contributions happening on all days of the week from April to January and it's really a non-going continuous improvement approach and the key principle here we used was user center design so not just designing and approving with the client but also involving there the final user in that process and making sure adoption is is going okay it's it's actually being adopted by the users they're not feeling confused or blocked people are using what what we've built in in the correct way and so of course this has to do with understanding the users interviewing them maybe recording them etc there's several several ways but this is a key principle as well the third case study I wanted to bring you is actually a product website as a product and so or if you prefer a startup website as a product so unbeable.com is a website we work continuously so we're always making improvements to it through an ongoing monthly retainer like I'm explaining here to you and we're always measuring monitoring improving and really the key principle here is data-driven decisions so we can give priority to the best improvements that make sense so my my friend Jagu Martins he always says I always ask the client if they have data if I have data I'm able to make smarter decisions right and this is really key if we don't have data we're just guessing and it's much harder so here we need to measure and improve we need you know learn and also adapt to that data that is coming in it's very hard to predict how users will behave so we need to really see the data to understand and I think here the secret is to do a quarterly planning but then you need to do weekly progress right you need to monitor those metrics weekly so you know what's going on and also set targets to improve so final notes we're really about selling value and approaching a website as a product is this ongoing relationship and we really need to you know see it better we need like my friend at the story I told you my friend actually saw that embroidery and she made it she transformed it she saw it better and we need to do that for our clients we cannot just leave it for the client to see to see it better we need to be an active part of that we need to help them see okay your business is here but actually enough in three years it could really be here and if we want that in one year we're going to need to be here and this quarter we're going to need to be here so it's all aligned you know and we cannot just leave that for the client we have to help in that process not from a superior place but at the same level we need to show them what's possible so as a web agency my advice and my lesson here is we should really approach more client websites as as products rather than one off with maintenance plans I'm really strongly advising not go don't go for maintenance because we don't want maintenance the client many times they also don't want maintenance they think they want maintenance but what they really want is the business to grow right so don't just build websites but go out there and create amazing products okay thank you very much