Building Products Inside a Consulting Career

Building something new inside a large professional services firm sounds like a contradiction. Consulting is built around client delivery, not product. Partners are rewarded for revenue, not for internal assets. The systems are tuned for managing risk, not for iterating. And yet some of the most useful learning of my career came from trying to build products inside exactly that environment.

The book that rewired how I thought

A lot of it started with a book. Around the time I was beginning to question how we worked, I read The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, by Richard and Daniel Susskind (Oxford University Press, 2015). It genuinely changed how I saw my own job.

Their argument was simple and uncomfortable. The professions, law, medicine, audit, tax and consulting, all run on what the Susskinds call a grand bargain: society grants experts a kind of exclusivity over specialist knowledge, and in return trusts them to be the gatekeepers of it. Technology, they argued, would slowly take that bargain apart. Professional work could be broken into its component tasks, much of it standardised and productised, and the expertise that used to sit behind a closed door would become far more widely available. They drew a sharp line between using technology to do the old thing a little faster, and using it to find genuinely new ways of sharing expertise; the first is really just optimisation, the second changes the shape of the profession itself.

Reading that not long after it came out, well before the AI we now take for granted, was a strange experience. It described a future that felt obvious to me and almost unbelievable to many of the people around me. When you work inside a firm whose whole model is built on expert advice delivered the traditional way, "your expertise is about to become a product" is not the easiest idea to land.

Trying to build it for real

That thinking is what pushed me from talking about the future of the profession to trying to build a piece of it. It led, in time, to asset-based consulting and to founding EY Growth Solutions: taking the intelligence the firm already had and turning it into digitally enabled products that could serve a far wider set of clients than any single engagement ever could. Instead of selling the same expertise one report at a time, the question became how you turn it into something repeatable that a client could use directly.

I want to be honest about how hard that was, because the tidy version usually leaves the pain out.

Part of it was simply the era. We were trying to build digital products at a point when the tools to build them were slower and more traditional. There was none of the speed you get now, where a working version of an idea can exist in an afternoon. Every prototype was real engineering effort, every experiment cost real money, and the distance between an idea and something a client could actually touch was wide.

Innovating inside an audit firm's risk culture

The harder part was the environment. A firm like that is, by design, a traditional audit business first. Consulting sits on top as something of a bolt-on, and the culture that protects the audit side, careful, conservative and deeply risk-managed, is exactly the culture that work needs. It is also close to the opposite of what lean start-up thinking asks of you.

That tension showed up in small, concrete ways. At one point, simply onboarding a customer onto a digital platform became a genuine blocker, because of a tiny independence risk tied to the firm's SEC audit clients. On any ordinary product team that is a non-issue. Inside an audit firm it is a real constraint you cannot wave away, and you have to design around it. For a while it was maddening, even though the people on the risk side were genuinely helpful and, at the time, excited that this was pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. But that is the reality of where we were building, and learning to innovate inside those constraints, rather than pretending they were not there, was part of the point.

None of it would have worked without leadership that chose to back it. I was fortunate to have people above me who gave us room to launch, learn and occasionally get it wrong, inside an organisation that was not built to do any of those things easily. That backing mattered more than any framework.

Why the constraints were worth it

Here is the part I did not fully appreciate at the time. The constraints were not only obstacles to get past, they were the thing that forced the thinking. Working out how to innovate inside a risk-first culture, with traditional tools and real limits, is what opened up the wider innovation agenda that eventually led to the MBRIF accelerator and the work I went on to do with start-ups and governments across the region. We would not have reached any of that without first learning to build it awkwardly, from the inside, under real constraints.

That is the quiet case for building inside a place that is not designed for it. You learn to turn an idea into something a client will genuinely pay for, not as a one-off but as a repeatable offering. You learn product thinking in a services world: what the core use case is, who the user is, and what makes them willing to pay. And you learn to be resourceful, because you cannot lean on a start-up's freedom to pivot or a technology firm's product culture. You have only what you have, and you make it work.

The Susskinds turned out to be right, and sooner than most of the profession expected. The people who saw it early were not the ones with the cleverest forecast, they were the ones who tried to build the future while it was still hard to believe, inside organisations that gave them just enough room to try.