Founded in 2009, Emergn focuses on helping organisations become more product-centric in their approach to work. It helps them deliver products to the market and into the hands of their customers more quickly and efficiently. Enterprise Times spoke to Alex Adamopoulos about the company and the recently launched Praxis.
Emergn has grown steadily, at an impressive 25%. Until the launch of Praxis it delivered project-based consulting engagements. With Praxis, it can now offer a hybrid mix of project-based and recurring revenue. Its customer base spans the Fortune 1,000, Global 2,000 and FTSE 100. While it targets enterprises, it has also worked with companies over £500 million.
The firm operates in 14 countries and employs over 600 staff members. However, Adamopoulos shared that the last couple of years have been challenging. The development of Praxis is undoubtedly an initiative aimed at kick-starting growth.
While Emergn’s main operations are mainly based in the UK and the US, it also has some less common locations. Adamopoulos identified Latvia and Portugal as its EU-based delivery centres. Other locations, such as Ukraine, Romania, and Armenia, were opened due to access to talent there. Emergn also has a strong base of remote talent.
On the Future
Adamopoulos has a vision for Emergn, saying, “Our vision for Emergn is to continue to become the leading player in the market for building product-centric companies and capabilities. We believe this is our expertise, and we have both IP and 15 years of heritage with great success to demonstrate why we think this is the right viewpoint for us to have in terms of a market position.”
By the end of 2025, Adamopoulos aims to have great brand awareness for Praxis as an industry-leading product management platform. He hopes to see continued success with clients, including some of the world’s largest organisations.
What differentiates Emergn?
What differentiates Emergn is the VFQ philosophy it first coined in 2012. VFQ stands for value, flow and quality. Adamopoulos describes it as “the lens through which we see the world of work.” He was adamant in pointing out that this is neither a framework nor a methodology.
I asked Adamopoulos how Emergn VFQ came into being. He answered, “We spent two years developing VFQ as a body of knowledge that combined all the major schools of thought at the time, including Agile, Lean Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, and even some psychology and science in there.
“We put these practices and principles together and established several case studies to publish the work. What it ended up becoming was a philosophy of how we delivered our work.”
Where Emergn is different is that it aims to help organisations understand how to transform themselves using a product-centric mindset. This is not about continuous engagement.
The company aims to equip customers with the right skills, capabilities, and processes to deliver product management without external resources, including Emergn.
Adamopoulos added, “It sounds unorthodox, but this is exactly what’s played well for us. We serve many already great companies. They just need that extra expertise or nudge to get over the line.”
The VFQ philosophy
VFQ looks at three different things: mindset, mechanics and measures.
- Mechanics is about helping organisations deploy the right principles and practices in the context of the organisation so that it works for them. It is not about deploying a Scaled Agile Framework or Scrum.
- Mindset is about helping people to change how they think about work. Adamopoulos explained, “Where they want to get to tangible measures of value, and they want to see outcomes quicker, and they want to think about work in an incremental fashion. That’s not a new concept anymore, but many organizations still struggle with that.”
- Measure is about having the right KPIs in place. It is not just about considering the NPV of a business case, but also considering the cost of delay for every week that passes, where a core feature has not been delivered. Annualise that cost and consider the impact on the business.
On Praxis
Praxis is a product management learning experience developed over the past 15 years by Emergn. Its consulting service has helped organisations with their product management capabilities. Praxis is the distillation of that knowledge.
Why is Emergn launching Praxis now, though? Emergn has utilised VFQ as a platform to deliver large-scale engagements and to teach individuals skills and capabilities. Praxis is VFQ productised, enabling Emergn to offer its full-service consultancy as well as an educational platform that can cater to companies of all sizes.
Adamopoulos added, “Now we have a three-tier architecture between Praxis, Pro, Business and Enterprise, and I believe it’ll help us educate the market in an easier way on why these skills matter and how they can get help.”
Praxis is available for individuals, and with its new subscription service, also means that SMES, including startups, will be able to leverage it to move their product management expertise forward. The challenge for organisations offering this to the large SME market is how they will service these smaller companies and individuals.
Adamopoulos explained, “We already have a dedicated Praxis team in-house that can offer support. We intend to continue to scale that team as the subscription base grows. We have people who can look after both the business and the enterprise side. We’ll also look after the B2C side.”
On Partners
Emergn has a different approach to many other organisations on partners. While it has technology and business partners, it also collaborates with what it refers to as knowledge and talent partners. The firm works with several industry groups such as Gartner and IDC, who cover the work it does within product management.
It has also built an MBA program in Product Management with the University of Arkansas. The Walton Family, the founding family behind Walmart, funds this. It also works with standard industry groups, including the Drucker Society. Adamopoulos is on the board of the global Peter Drucker Society, and he noted, “They’re a big partner in terms of how we talk about it and position our value prop.”
Emergn is also listed as an Oracle and SAP partner. I asked Adamopoulos to explain those relationships. He replied, “Part of our value proposition is product engineering, and so we build digital products for several companies. SAP is a client, and we build some SAP software. But as a product engineering line of business, we have several key partnerships, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and some others.”
On the Market
As for the competition of other consulting firms, Adamopoulos explained the clear focus that Emergn has, which differentiates it from those often larger consulting firms.
He commented, “Part of our challenge is that everyone says they can do everything. We work very hard to differentiate by emphasising our expertise in this whole shift from project to product.
“It’s why we use phrases like product-centric, which I know is a marketing term for some, and they don’t really define them. The reality of being able to help a company embed product thinking, product management capability, and better views around portfolio management.”
Adamopoulos believes that it is this specialisation that many of its competitors cannot provide. He acknowledges that there are larger consulting firms that help run major initiatives inside companies, which Emergn is not suited for. It helps firms move from a project to a product-centric approach. Transforming how they look at the product or service lifecycle from ideation through production.
Creating a new product category
With a new product, Emergn is aiming to create a market that doesn’t exist fully yet. The question is whether any of the geopolitical and economic disruptions are having an impact.
Adamopoulos explained, “I don’t think, as an industry, we still understand the economic impact over the last 24 to 36 months. Some of the large enterprise companies still have to spend to compete, whether they’re using a buzzword like AI or still looking at being more digital. Budgets are always a concern in terms of the mindset around organisational spending.
“There’s still a talent gap in the market. For us, helping educate companies that they can solve some of that by upskilling their people, using Emergn, and using Praxis is still an opportunity. It’s also a macro topic because companies are struggling with how to solve it.
“Given the current political climate of many countries, plus the ongoing challenges in the world right now, some people are still cautious. I don’t think we’re experiencing anything unusual from anyone we know.
“We have to be more mindful of knowing how to help an organization, versus being presumptuous, that they will take the help. For a company our size and one that has an established brand that gets to work with some of the world’s biggest organizations, we can’t be presumptuous.
“We have to be very deliberate about how we design or solve something for a customer because of all the factors that could impact them.”
On Priorities
Adamopoulos sees the priorities for the business is to grow its customer base and, therefore, subsequently, its revenue. He also wants to make sure the company is known for having world-class products and an approach that is “what we say we do”. That will be validated by customer feedback, NPS scores and customer success.
What about challenges? Adamopoulos replied, “My challenges are market expansion, growing our revenue base, continuing to provide a level of service that I believe our customers love because that’s a big measure of our success, and continuing to grow our talent.”
Product centricity is an approach not considered by many organisations. Is education a concern and a challenge?
Adamopolous replied, “If we take what the analysts say about this space and what we see from our customer base, there’s an enormous education gap in product management. There’s also a greater gap in the understanding of how the skills it represents apply to non-product management roles.”
The Book Question
I asked Asampoulos what the latest book he read was and his takeaways for business from it?
The book was Amy Edmondson’s “Right Kind of Wrong” (Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive – Amazon Aus, UK, US). Adamopoulos explained, “Amy talks a lot about the positive side of failure. Last year, we published what ended up becoming our most successful thought paper in 15 years on how to overcome transformation fatigue.
“It’s a term we use often. If I had swapped those two words, fatigue and failure, there were many things that Amy discussed that resonated with our work, and we found to be fascinating. In fact, we’re co-publishing a thought paper with Amy on those two topics combined.”
