Your operating model is a delivery system. Its job is to serve and create the customer experience. Most aren't designed that way. They're built around functions and reporting lines, with the customer added in afterwards. Understanding how your organisation needs to be shaped around delivery is the starting point. And that means making the end-to-end system visible. This post covers the mapping…
Recently, 3 observations keep twitching at me, again and again (as they do). And I think they track through to the same point. 1. Too much design upfront I see many design teams spending months researching every angle. Mapping everything. Trying to understand it all before moving. The intent is right. But if design doesn't follow through to delivery, it isn't user-centred. Nothing has been…
A few months ago, I moved to a three-day week at Public Digital to build my own business alongside consulting. The focus of that independent work is helping organisations apply service design at an organisation-wide scale, using practical, productised methods that make it easier to continue the work in-house. As part of that, I’m developing an end-to-end operating model method . The method helps…
Many teams and leaders are under pressure to deliver more, better, faster, with less. While the reality is that delivery feels harder than it should. There can be many reasons for this - capability gaps, lack of prioritisation, unclear strategy, low morale. The most consistent issue is a lack of focus on how the organisation creates value for customers, and how this translates into delivery. In…
In the 3.5 years I’ve been a consultant, I’ve been lucky to get inside the depths of a wide range of very different organisations. Most of my work has been in digital transformation, helping design how teams, strategy, and operating models work to speed up delivery, strengthen operations, and improve the customer experience. It’s meant seeing how the day-to-day work actually happens, how…
The most effective operating models start with delivery. They’re built around delivering value to customers through products and services. (You can read more about that in my previous post: Forget the org chart. Start with delivery. ) Behind every strong delivery model is an invisible ecosystem. For products and services to work at scale, they need the right enablers: platforms, data, and…
Most operating model designs start in the wrong place. They begin with the organisation chart. Boxes, reporting lines, governance structures. It looks neat on paper but doesn’t tell you much about how value is delivered. It’s best to start with delivery. With how value flows to customers. Once you understand that, the type of operating model you need becomes obvious. Only then should you shape the…
Written by Blessing Ajimoti and Katherine Wastell Organisations are rushing to adopt AI, and the impact on the customer experience is already being felt. Long term, AI has the potential to move customer experience away from screens and closer to the flow of real life. Today, most services push people through artificial digital touchpoints such as clicks, logins, forms and apps. But with AI…
There's a lot of talk about flexible working. Most organisations now recognise its importance, and many have policies in place. But too often, these policies miss the point. Flexibility isn't just about when people work, it's about how they work. And many organisations struggle to embrace the full range of what that really means. The hierarchy of flexibility There's an unspoken hierarchy of what…
I’ve just finished reading Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen. One of the main concepts in the book is the difference between thoughts and thinking. It explains how overthinking can destroy our motivation and hopes. Too much thinking takes the raw, joyful thoughts we have and turns them into stories about why something isn’t possible. At its essence, this links back to the…
Over the years in the teams I’ve led and supported, I’ve observed a unique skill-set in the designers with transformation experience. They’ve learnt how to do design in challenging, high-pressure environments, taking strategic steps towards long-term outcomes. Recently it’s been noted that recruiters are filtering designers based on experience at big-name tech companies ( often referred to as…
The reality in all organisations is that you can’t do everything. You need to focus where you’ll see the best return on investment. That could be for operational efficiency, growth through a better customer experience, or improving the tools colleagues use. There are always constraints and limits, and you have to make trade-offs. The utopia of good services is long-lived teams , and that means…
To add further confusion into the mix, maybe it’s a platform? The distinction between products, services, and platforms has confused most teams I’ve worked with. Just as soon as you think you’re clear on it, something changes and the debate starts all over again. Even among digitally mature companies the debate rages on. Airbnb recently introduced the concept of end-to-end service mapping , a…
In recent years design has been expected to prove its worth. We’ve got much better at designing for metrics, ROI, and the relentless pursuit of optimisation. Numbers are important, they create focus. We’ve refined our practice to solve the problems our customers and our users face. User needs are important, they create focus. And yet, sometimes we need to break focus. Let’s say, you’ve built a…
The application of user research to develop products and services is well-established. To create a product or service that’s successful, we have to understand how customers are using it so we can improve it. We know this drives business outcomes, as well as customer satisfaction. And yet we rarely apply this thinking to our wider organisational strategy. When it comes to the question of developing…
Establishing design in an organisation is a phased journey involving team building, skill and craft development, and strategic influence. For design to truly have impact, focus must extend across delivery teams and the wider organisational strategy and culture. This requires years of effort, to ensure design has high standards, has the space and focus to deliver, and the influence needed to solve…
Every designer I know loves doing design. It’s a passion; it’s creative, it’s exploratory, it’s future-focused. Many people aspire to design because of its hands-on, problem-solving nature. Experienced designers are experts at balancing the detail of understanding problems with strategic oversight - zooming in and out. It takes time to get good at that, based on years of mistakes, success, and…
To identify user research findings, you need to take lots of information and distill it into meaningful patterns and themes. It’s one of those skills that some people are naturally good at, but they struggle to teach to others. Your research findings should tell you something you didn’t know before, so you can form insights that help you to take action. These findings should be simple, clearly…
It's really important to share appreciation. With other people and yourself. Your mindset changes. When you change your mindset to look for the good instead of the bad in the people around you, you begin to notice just how fantastic they are. Your mood improves. Our mood and daily outlooks change when we focus on positive things rather than negative. Simply removing negative words from your…
Genius is a word we often use for people who do things differently, who refuse to follow the usual rules, who challenge the way things are done. It's a term reserved for people who show extraordinary creativity, often paving the way for groundbreaking change. Geniuses don't follow the crowd. They have the ability to see the world from unique perspectives and refuse to conform to established norms.…