There is a pattern that appears surprisingly often in technology companies: people who are exceptionally good at advising businesses struggle when they try to build products themselves.
People sometimes call this “the curse of the consultant.”
At first glance, it makes little sense. Consultants are usually analytical, commercially aware, articulate, and deeply experienced across industries. They understand markets, organisations, and incentives better than most founders ever will. In theory, they should be perfectly positioned to build successful products.
But consulting and product-building reward very different instincts.
Consulting optimises for insight, responsiveness, and strategic clarity. Product companies optimise for repetition, distribution, execution, and long-term ownership of a narrow problem. A consultant succeeds by diagnosing complexity. A product company succeeds by removing it.
That tension has become increasingly relevant because the consulting industry itself is changing. Traditional strategy work is under pressure, while clients increasingly expect consultancies to deliver implementation, technology, and actual products rather than recommendations alone. The large firms have all shifted in this direction — building engineering capabilities, acquiring software companies, and positioning themselves around “transformation” and execution rather than pure strategy. (Financial Times)
You can see the language changing everywhere. Firms that once sold advice now talk about “building,” “delivery,” and “implementation.” Even strategy firms increasingly position themselves as end-to-end operators rather than external thinkers. (ftstrategies.com)
The problem is that actually creating outcomes for users (aka Product) is not simply strategy plus engineering.
One of the biggest differences is the move from bespoke solutions to repeatable ones. Consultants are trained to adapt their work to each client because customization is valuable in services businesses. Product companies win by doing almost the opposite: finding one painful problem shared by many users and standardising the solution aggressively.
That shift is much harder than it sounds.
Consultants also tend to overestimate the importance of strategic sophistication and underestimate the importance of distribution, or simply making something for users. A market can be diagnosed brilliantly and still fail commercially because of complexity, lack of utility, onboarding was poor, the timing was wrong, or users simply did not change their behaviour. Many successful products are not strategically elegant. They are just consistently useful.
Another common trap is building for sophistication instead of frequency. Consultants naturally gravitate toward complex, high-value workflows because complexity signals importance in enterprise environments. But many enduring products succeed because they solve repetitive, emotionally frustrating, everyday problems. Simplicity often scales better than sophistication.
There is also a deeper mindset difference around focus. Consulting rewards breadth and responsiveness. Product-building requires obsession. The best product companies narrow themselves aggressively around one customer segment and one painful wedge. That means saying no constantly — to features, customisations, adjacent opportunities, and stakeholder requests. For people trained to keep expanding the scope of the conversation, that can feel unnatural.
The same applies to validation. Consultants are usually very good at getting executives to agree that an idea is interesting or strategically sound. But polite enthusiasm is not product-market fit. Users changing behaviour is product-market fit. Users paying repeatedly is product-market fit.
And perhaps most importantly, consultants often abstract too early. Frameworks, operating models, scalable architectures, and strategic systems all feel valuable because they are valuable in advisory work. But strong product companies usually begin in much messier ways: manual processes, incomplete tooling, ugly prototypes, and constant iteration based on real user behaviour. The systems come later.
Underneath all of this is an identity shift. Consulting rewards being right. Product-building rewards learning quickly. Consulting rewards polished answers. Product-building rewards shipping imperfect things and discovering what users actually do.
That is why so many consultancies are now struggling through the transition from advice to execution. The market increasingly wants implementation and measurable outcomes rather than presentations and recommendations alone. AI is accelerating that pressure by commoditising parts of traditional strategy work and pushing firms toward more operational and technical delivery models. (Financial Times)
Many consultants will become exceptional founders and builders. But the successful ones usually unlearn part of the consulting mindset first. They get closer to users, focus more narrowly, ship faster, tolerate imperfection, and realise that distribution and behaviour matter more than intellectual elegance.
People sometimes summarise the difference like this:
Consultants sell answers. Product companies discover them.
Or more simply:
Services scale with people. Products scale with sameness.
