If you’ve been turning over the difference between productising and commoditising your work, the asking itself usually tells me you’ve already built something real — you’ve held one-to-one clients for years, you’ve watched your calendar fill and empty in waves, you’ve felt the pull to package what you do into something repeatable, and you’ve also felt a quiet worry that packaging might flatten the very thing that makes your work yours. It’s not you. The two words get used as if they mean the same thing, and most of the business advice you’ve absorbed has quietly folded one into the other without saying so out loud. You’re not behind for finding the line blurry. You’ve just been given one piece at a time, and nobody slowed down enough to show you how the pieces fit.
So let’s slow down. Both productising and commoditising involve taking something you do and turning it into a thing you sell. That’s where the resemblance ends. The intent underneath each one is different, the relationship to your craft is different, and — most importantly for a conscious entrepreneur with adverse childhood experiences — the effect on your nervous system over time is different.
Productising: shaping what you do into something repeatable
Productising is the act of taking the work you already do well and giving it a clearer shape. The shape might be a container with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be a programme with named stages. It might be a service with a fixed scope and a fixed price. The point of productising isn’t to remove you from the work. The point is to make the work easier to find, easier to buy, and easier to deliver without you reinventing the offer from scratch every time someone enquires.
When productising is done well, three things happen. The buyer understands what they’re getting. You understand what you’ve promised. And the gap between the two — the gap where over-functioning, scope creep, and quiet resentment usually live — gets noticeably smaller. For someone who learned early to read the room and meet whatever was needed, that boundary alone can change the texture of the whole business.
Productising still carries your fingerprints. Your voice is in the materials. Your judgment shapes the delivery. The person buying the product is buying a specific version of you working in a specific way. The repeatability lives in the structure, not in the soul of the thing.
Commoditising: stripping the work down until anyone could deliver it
Commoditising is something else. To commoditise an offer is to strip it down until what’s being sold is interchangeable with what a hundred other people are selling. Same scope, same price, same outcome promise, same delivery. The buyer chooses on price or convenience because there’s nothing else to choose on. The craft has been sanded away on purpose, usually so the offer can scale, automate, or compete at the bottom of a market.
Commoditising isn’t inherently bad. Whole industries run on it, and some of those industries deliver real value. A commoditised offer can be the right move when the work genuinely is interchangeable, when speed and price matter more than nuance, or when you’re deliberately building a low-touch tier underneath a higher-touch one. The honest question is whether that’s what you actually want for the work you’re shaping right now — or whether the language of commoditising has crept in because that’s what the business advice in your feed has been quietly modelling.
Where the two get confused
The confusion usually shows up at the pricing layer. Someone tells you to productise, and you hear “make it cheaper, make it bigger, make it run without you.” That’s not productising. That’s commoditising with productising on the label. The two get tangled because the surface moves — packaging, naming, pricing, sales pages — look almost identical from the outside. The difference lives underneath, in what you’re actually willing to remove.
A productised offer removes friction. A commoditised offer removes you. Read that line twice if it lands.
For a conscious entrepreneur with adverse childhood experiences, the distinction matters more than it does for most. The patterns that childhood adversity tends to install — over-functioning, fawn-response client dynamics, under-charging because you can feel the buyer’s hesitation in your body — often push you toward commoditising while believing you’re productising. You quietly drop the price. You quietly expand the scope. You quietly take on the parts of delivery that should have lived inside a clearer container. By the third launch, what started as a productised programme has become a commoditised one in everything but name, and the part of you that’s tired isn’t tired because the work is hard. It’s tired because the structure stopped holding.
How to tell which one you’re actually doing
A few honest questions usually surface the truth faster than another framework. When you imagine someone else delivering this offer exactly as you’ve built it, does anything important get lost? If yes, you’re productising. If no, you’re commoditising. When you read your sales page, does the price feel connected to the specific transformation, or does it feel benchmarked against what other people in your category charge? When a client asks for “a little extra,” does your offer have a clear edge that holds, or does it quietly stretch? The answers don’t make you wrong either way. They just tell you which game you’re actually playing, so you can choose it on purpose instead of drifting into it.
This is also where the inner work and the business work meet. The decision to productise without sliding into commoditising is partly strategic and partly somatic. You have to be able to hold a price without flinching, hold a scope without softening, and hold your own value when a client tests it. That’s not a marketing skill. That’s the work the Three Pillars point at — the inner game, the outer game, and the integration between them. It’s closely related to the distinction between a money block and a pricing problem, and it lives in the same neighbourhood as the question of scaling versus growing. You can’t strategy your way out of a pattern your body is still running.
Choosing on purpose
Neither productising nor commoditising is the right answer in the abstract. The right answer is the one you choose with your eyes open, knowing what each costs and what each makes possible. Productising keeps your craft intact and asks you to hold clearer edges. Commoditising trades depth for reach and asks you to be honest about whether reach is what this offer is for. Both can be honourable. The trouble only starts when one is happening under the name of the other, and you find yourself working harder for less while wondering what you did wrong.
If you’d like to think this through with people who are wrestling with the same line — between shaping the work and flattening it, between releasing the brakes and pressing the accelerator harder — you’re warmly invited to come and sit with us inside the miraclesfor.me Skool community. There’s a free trial, and you can read for a while before you say a word.
Leave a Reply