Roadmap for the Commons
Mostly for the benefit of the supplier collective, this page is to overview our current status and outline a foreseeable roadmap.
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Things have changed and will continue to change, as we adapt to the reality of market and vendor challenges, types and structures.
Partner Acquisition
Sourcing Commons Members
The ongoing goal is to attract a large variety of niche, innovative launch partners.
Service Taxonomy
Taxonomising our services as a collective
This was our first major obstacle.
We had to figure out how to organise a large number of both very broad and very narrow service offerings beneath a single market proposition.
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How to find the right balance of competitiveness and vendor stability - how to ensure fairness to new and existing suppliers without compromising our group efficacy?
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A key outtake from supplier conversations was to allow the final selection step to be one of self-organisation, hence the Pitch Process that kicks off all new business.
Partner Onboarding
Ensuring our agreements reflect our Mission
We had to establish SLAs (service level agreements) and Terms with our Suppliers to ensure they would meet promises to you and deliver on our Price Match Guarantee.
Constitution
Founding doctrine and democratic decision making installed
With our futurists hat on, our goal in forming our constitution is to foresee how all this could go wrong once we hit a certain scale.
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The key challenge is how to ensure ethical business and algorithmic practices across the entire group.
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The current draft can be found on the Mission page - get in touch if you'd like to share your thoughts (we'd like to hear them).
Sales Team
Centralized Account Service and Cross Selling Opportunities
Our Account Service has been designed to host the variety of vendor services beneath a unified - but specialized - sales team.
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We've decided Account Service staff will be designated according to the industry that suits their industry experience (versus allocated to specific Suppliers).
They will then draw on the full range of service offerings when guiding clients through the Pitch Process.
Group Marketing
Leveraging group media investment and a unified brand
Our vendors work in every nook and cranny of the market - a testament to the applicability of machine learning.
As a result, our 'umbrella brand' will be relevant across the entire market whilst allowing us very specific messaging - a general consultancy of specialists!
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Activity will include partnerships with event organisers, non-profit organisations, competitions, media publications, blogging sites and building a social media presence with a content strategy emphasising our supplier strengths.
Project Management
Unified Service for Central Project Management
This step is to take us from a sales directory to a unified organisation, paving the way for group level pitches.
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We will move slowly, but the general direction will be to centralize Project Management, so clients have a single point of contact across multiple projects involving multiple vendors.
Cross-selling is the most immediate benefit, but the true value will be in crafting a centralized operations team to fairly and effectively represent our many partners.
Group Level Pitches
Capitalizing on Share of Voice
This is the really exciting part.
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With 60 suppliers - each vendor averaging 20 engineers, the Machine Commons already represents a workforce of over 1200 technical people.
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When we reach 100 suppliers - or even 1000, we will have an unrivaled machine learning scale in the consultancy world - so long as it's well organised.
If our decentralized approach to consultancy proves effective, this opens up a whole new level of project budgets. Without large central overheads, our pricing and delivery will be potent and unique.
