Why 92% of firms still buy projects and call it product

Most Nordic clients say they want product teams. They are still buying hours and profiles.

That gap, between what they ask for and what they contract for, is where every consultancy I know is getting stuck right now.

In 2023 Planview's Project to Product State of the Industry report surveyed 326 companies and analysed more than 3,600 software value streams across 34 enterprises. Only 8% of organisations had actually operationalised a product operating model. The other 92% are still running projects and calling them products (Planview, 2023). The words have changed. The money has not.

Key takeaways:

• Only 8% of organisations have operationalised a product operating model, per Planview's 2023 benchmark of 326 companies
• Procurement and framework agreements in the Nordics still price hours, roles, and rates rather than outcomes
• Gartner finds top-performing organisations are 3.2x more likely to use outcome-measured product teams
• NHO's Kompetansebarometer 2025 reports 6 in 10 Norwegian companies have unmet competence needs, with IT called out by name
• The shift to product orientation starts with one diagnostic question asked before a proposal goes out

They say product. They buy project.

When a Nordic client asks for product orientation, they rarely mean the same thing twice.

Some have kept annual budget cycles, project steering committees, and procurement templates that buy roles and rates. They have a product team on the org chart and a project contract underneath it. Others have rebuilt around value streams and can feel it working, but their finance model hasn't caught up. Capitalisation rules were written for CapEx projects. The PMO still reports on scope completion. The contract their supplier signed still reads like a 2018 staff augmentation deal.

McKinsey's recent work on what they call the agentic organization puts numbers on this. 89% of organisations still operate in industrial-age models, 9% run agile or product-and-platform operating models from the digital age, and only 1% act as a decentralized network. The shift to product is not an emerging trend. It is a rare one.

In the Norwegian public sector the contradiction is mechanical. Statens standardavtaler still drive most procurement. SSA-T and SSA-R were updated in June 2024, but the billing structure stayed hour and role based. If the contract buys timer per uke, the team is a project team, no matter what the org chart says about it.

The gap between what buyers ask for and what they sign is where Nordic consulting sells or loses the next five years. In my own pipeline the same customer asks for a "product team" on the intake call and signs a standard SSA-T at contract. The job of sales is to notice and ask.

This is connected to the broader restructuring I wrote about in the reskill or die piece on Nordic IT academies. The academy model only pays off if the contract on the other end is worth teaching for.

What product orientation actually requires

Marty Cagan's book Transformed frames the product operating model as three decisions: how you build, how you solve problems, and how you decide which problems to solve. The third is where most consultancies stop short.

SVPG's own summary is tighter than most internal decks. Product teams are empowered. They are measured on outcomes, not output. They own the problem end-to-end. They collaborate across product, design, and engineering as one unit, not as three departments in a meeting.

Inside a consultancy, that has four concrete implications.

• The team stays. Fixed team, fixed mission, through multiple quarters. No rolling bench swaps mid-sprint.
• The KPI is shared. The team's success metric is the customer's metric, not our utilisation rate.
• The roadmap is co-owned. We sit in their planning sessions, not at the edge of them.
• The sale doesn't end at signature. It ends when the outcome is stable.

Most Nordic consultancies can name one or two of these in their offer deck. Running all four, on a specific client, quarter after quarter, is a different kind of work. It is also where the margin differential shows up.

Mik Kersten's follow-up book Output to Outcome, due 2026, takes this further. His original Project to Product argued the company was the bottleneck. The new argument is that AI has made output so cheap that the bottleneck has moved to organisational structure itself. Outputs got cheap. Outcomes did not. Structures that were built to ship output cannot price outcomes.

That is the strategic problem behind every procurement form that still asks for hours.

The sales conversation changes, or it doesn't

Hodesalg, the Norwegian shorthand for selling heads and profiles, is what most procurement is built to buy. Timer per uke. Rolle. Rate. It is predictable on both sides, which is why it persists.

Outcome contracts are a different conversation. They move higher up in the customer organisation. They go slower. They require the seller to know the customer's business, not just our CV bench. We have to be able to describe the value a team creates over time, not how many hours it logged last month.

It is rarely either/or. The pattern that actually works in my pipeline is land-and-expand, used deliberately. Start with a classic assignment, let the team prove itself on a clean scope, then propose a more outcome-based model in the next renewal. It matures both sides. The customer learns to buy it. We learn to price it without guessing.

The seller has to become a diagnostician. When the intake call says "we need a senior data engineer," the conversation below that is the one worth having. Who owns this product at your end? Which metric moves if this team lands? How will you measure it in six months? Most customers do not have clean answers. That is where the value sits.

Vaimo announced value-based pricing as a contracting option because AI broke the cost basis for hour-billed digital work. They are an early signal, not proof the whole market has moved. But the direction is clear. If a senior engineer plus a model can do three juniors' work, the hour rate on that seat has to be replaced with something else. Either a bigger scope per team or a different pricing anchor altogether.

This is the same argument I made in AI tools are not a strategy. The tool does not replace the conversation. It raises what the conversation has to be about.

Three pressures Nordic consulting is already under

The pressure is coming from three directions at the same time. A consultancy planning the next twelve months has to answer all three.

1. AI is compressing the billable hour.

When a task becomes cheaper and faster to deliver with a tool, the hour rate on that task collapses. Clients will ask what the team adds on top of the tool, and the answer has to be measurable. Kersten's framing is useful: outputs are cheap now, outcomes are the scarcity. Consultancies that can price and prove outcomes keep their margins. The rest compete on rate until they lose.

2. The skills gap is real and still growing.

NHO's Kompetansebarometer 2025, published in February 2026, reports that six in ten Norwegian companies have unmet competence needs. IT and ICT are called out explicitly. Building engineering capability internally is still slower than buying it. That gap is an opening, but only for consultancies who can deliver more than a CV. A team that lands on day one with its own fagmiljø and continuity is worth paying differently for.

3. Customers want fewer, deeper partnerships.

The direction of travel is away from ten preferred suppliers and toward three strategic ones. Clients want negotiating weight and accountability in one place. They want a partner who takes real co-ownership of the outcome, not a staffing firm that posts profiles into their Slack. A consultancy that can credibly do that earns a larger share of wallet, longer contracts, and fewer bidding rounds.

Are we ready? Partially. The fagmiljø is there. The portfolio is there. What gets built over the next twelve months is the sales muscle for this type of conversation, and the internal alignment between strategy, sales, and delivery. That is where the work sits.

What to do from Monday

If you sell into Nordic IT buyers, change one thing this week.

Before you send a proposal, ask one extra question. Not "which profile do you need." Ask: "Which outcome are you trying to land, and how will you measure it in six months?"

Do that once a week for a year, and you have had fifty better conversations than last year. A meaningful share of them will become longer, higher-margin contracts. The rest will clarify what you are and are not willing to sell. Either way it is progress.

Three diagnostic questions that move the dialogue from capacity to product orientation:

• Who owns this product on your side? Not who owns the team budget. Who is accountable for the outcome the team exists to move.
• What stops working six months from now if we do not solve this? Reframes a role request as a problem statement.
• What does "good" look like, measured? If the answer is "we'll know it when we see it," you have a different sale to make first.

The old consulting model was built around capacity. The new one is built around ownership. Every Nordic consultancy I respect is somewhere on the path between them. The question is whether the sales function is leading or following.

If you are on the sell side of this right now, you already know the answer. It starts on the intake call. Ask the extra question, listen for the gap between product orientation and project procurement, and price accordingly.

More on what I work on at Experis Academy and elsewhere is on my about page.