Platforms for the World to Build Upon
Why Quirky’s Undercurrent Acquisition Makes So Much Sense
As a strategist and organizational designer sometimes located in New York, I’ve remained impressed at the work Undercurrent has done over the last few years. Hell, I’ve even ripped them off a time or two. I’ve gotten to become friends with several members and alumni of the organization, so I was excited to hear of their acquisition by Quirky this week. Understanding the alignment of purpose of both, the move made a lot of sense to me prima facie. However, several people have asked me to explain why a product company would ever acquire a consultancy, so I’m going to attempt to offer my point of view. Please Note: This is based on my own perspective and work, not direct insight into the UC/Quirky deal.
Some Notes on Modern Consultancy
I’m not going to spend a great deal of time explaining what it is organizational designers do, as I have done so before, and Undercurrent has practically a library of information on the topic. I will point out that, among other things, we specialize in developing business models that emerge from what often constitutes a very different way of thinking about work than many people are used to. The way that companies generate products and render services has changed a lot over the years, and necessarily the way that we structure work and relationships in organizations has had to change–equally, we should expect to mark evolution in how we sell and model our businesses. In a world where complexity is the null condition, everything we do should be about harnessing change for our customer’s advantage.
Why Custom Product Companies Have Consultants
Recently I cofounded a product company with a few other folks. We’re working on deploying robots into pretty complex use cases in a few different verticals. We sell to commercial businesses, and every product we deploy is custom-tailored to solve specific hazardous exposure problems that are part of these very inflexible workflows. However, by being flexible in our deployments, we can offer significant improvements to worker safety without the expense to our customers that comes from rebuilding processes from the ground up. Similar to Quirky’s “Powered by Quirky,” we operate on what we sort of blandly call Platform-as-a-Service.
I love robots, and I love tinkering, but ultimately I’m a systems consultant, not an engineer. I’m not the person who builds and tests and iterates on these things (though I put my time in when I’m needed!). My core function with Apellix is to walk alongside customers in the journey of developing the practices, ways of working, and purpose orientation that allow them to adapt quickly–not only to the immediate change that we are bringing by deploying new technology, but to the continuous change that our platform empowers. This is one part sales in generating custom business models, and many parts service, but it is a necessary function for building disruption into the system itself. Apellix doesn’t sell robots that automate work, we sell a sophisticated platform for continuously and increasingly moving people out of harm’s way…even in processes that seem designed to keep people in it.
Delivery of Value vs. Pushing Product
From my view, Quirky is deploying at least this level of customization across a much wider variety of customers, and a much more diverse set of use cases than Apellix. Bringing on a shop both as advanced in practice and aligned in purpose as Undercurrent dramatically expands Quirky’s capacity to ensure continuous delivery of value to their customers, which directly improves the quality of the sales that they make.
“As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.”
This is our job now. If we expect soulfulness from organizations, which we increasingly do, then fire-and-forget sales can no longer be part of our operational paradigm. Our task is to make sure that the value-delivery lifecycle of what we offer extends, and that our customers know how to best use what we’re selling. As conditions change, specific best practices may evolve, but if we have built adaptiveness into our offering then our customers shouldn’t be exposed by this. Pairing responsive consultancy with hard product development allows something that once had a limited and deterministic value lifecycle to become increasingly plastic.
A Trend?
If the advent of X-as-a-Service models is any indication, the way that people connect with brands is changing. We increasingly want ongoing connection to solutions, and decreasingly look to simply have a widget in our pocket. As the use cases for these solutions see mounting complexity (such as with companies like ours or Quirky that are selling to other businesses) expect to hear about acquisition strategies like Quirky-Undercurrent more often.
I’m not really one for forecasting with any certainty, but I think this deal represents an exciting possibility for the future of both product development partnerships and consultancy.
The future is dead, long live the future.
