Benchmark the outside before you restructure the inside

The intent was settled, but the apparatus was missing

An 8 to 10 week sprint, from September 2025. A €3B global speciality chemicals company. A standalone piece, not part of a series.

A €3B global specialty chemicals company decided to evolve from a product-only model into a services and product business. It had the products, the customers, and the intent. What it lacked was the structure for selling, delivering, or supporting a digital service.

The company intended to move to a scalable digital services business. What it lacked was the organizational apparatus: the structures, processes, and tools that make a service something a company can sell repeatedly rather than just once.

Knowledge of digital services did exist inside the business. However, it was fragmented across stakeholders and held in silos, with no unified framework to hang it on. Consequently, nobody could definitively say which function owned which part of a digital offering. The stated risk was delayed rollout, inefficient delivery, and service revenues that never materialized.

You cannot benchmark the outside by looking inside

Internal core teams were at near-full capacity running the existing product operation. While true, lack of capacity is an excuse that stops too early as it predicts a slow answer, rather than no answer at all.

The harder constraints were twofold:

1. The Vantage Point

   The evidence required to answer this question does not exist inside the company at any price. Designing a digital services organization requires knowing how companies that already run one have structured their commercialization, delivery, and support. That knowledge sits in other companies. No amount of internal time or seniority can produce a peer benchmark, because the benchmark is, by definition, external.

2. The Repetition Deficit

   A product business builds its first services organization exactly once. The people asked to design it are experts at running products, but they have never built a digital service apparatus. There is no earlier internal attempt to improve upon.

The company had the fundamental capability; what it lacked was an external comparison it had no way to independently obtain.

Breaking silos to enable scale

The client's Vice President of Digital Strategy noted that the engagement helped them "cut through the complexity and benchmark best practices for digital services far faster than we could internally."

Two figures are published, one is left out

One figure is left out. A 25% faster time-to-market sits on the case record and is not published here. It carries no qualifier, its verb claims the improvement was delivered rather than identified, and it states no baseline, so there is no way to say faster than what. A figure with no baseline is not publishable even when it is probably true.

What is published instead are the two counts and the fieldwork behind them, 10 expert interviews and 2 steering workshops. They describe what was done rather than what it is claimed to have achieved.

Source. Every figure here comes from the SprintlyWorks engagement record for this case, a €3B global speciality chemicals company, September 2025. Clients are described, never named. The benchmarked companies are not identified, because that comparison set is the client's own.

Buy the comparison, then run the structure

The answer to "why did we not do this ourselves?" is that a company can design a structure internally, but it cannot benchmark one internally. The inside of a business cannot produce a view of how other businesses are organized, and that external view is exactly what modern organizational design rests upon.

We place one senior analyst and two analysts on one defined question for 8 to 10 weeks. The client receives the fieldwork, the analysis, and the handover. Crucially, the client keeps the method, so the eventual re-benchmark becomes their own team's work.

If your business is adding a service to a product it already sells well, and the structure for it does not yet exist, that is the exact problem this sprint addresses.

Write to rahul.abhisek@sprintlyworks.com and we will tell you on the first call whether it is worth the time. If a sprint is the wrong instrument, we will say so instead.