Month: June 2015

For the final meeting of the Service Design book club, we covered Chapter 9 and did an overall debrief of the book. This chapter was the least liked by the group. We could tell that it was written by a different author, making it feel disjointed from the rest of the book. The subject was also about assessing whether a service is ethical, which did not pertain much to our services.

However, the chapter got more relevance recently for me at the Mind The Product SF conference when Marty Cagan promoted adding “Ethical” as a new fourth dimension to a Product Manager’s values of Viable, Feasible, and Usable. He talked about how too often he’s seen Product Managers ignore the ethical nature of their products to pursue the latest fad in technology or profits. I agree that it’s a value to consider when designing a service or product, and when training a new Product Manager it’s an important discussion as often a new Product Manager has not been in a position to make decisions that could have wide-ranging ethical impacts. Rather than telling the new Product Manager if something is ethical or not, teach them how to talk about ethical attributes of their product with teams like Legal and Security to determine it for themselves. Since ethics can be subjective, it’s crucial for them to get feedback from others on tough decisions rather than assuming that they know best.

If you’d like discussion questions for Chapter 9 and an overall debrief for your own book club, here are some that I used:

• Did the triple-bottom line of economic, societal, and environmental impact resonate with you? How do you feel we perform in regards to these three measures?
• Which practices from this book would you like to try out?
• What’s your one take-away from this book?

And as this was the last session of the Service Design book club, here are links to the prior posts. If you decide to run your own, it’d be awesome to hear how it went for you and what types of conversations you had.

1. Service Design – Classify your Service Model
2. Service Design – The Spirit of Discovery
3. Service Design – Service Blueprinting
4. Service Design – Expectation Setting
5. Service Design – Is your Service Ethical?

For the fourth session of the Service Design we looked at Chapter 7 and 8 which covered Service prototyping and measuring services.

One of the themes of this section was in setting expectations. Services are experienced through the lens of  expectations, so it’s important to know what expectations your customers have before they use your service and what expectations the rest of your service has set. You can then design experiences that both meet these expectations and set appropriate expectations for other experiences in your service offering.

For Product Managers, the adage for expectation setting is “under promise, over deliver.” Whether it’s talking about future roadmap items or responding to support issues, be sure to set expectations that you can over-fulfill. I’ve found this adage is an especially good one to teach to new Product Managers as likely they’ve had an experience of over-promising that they never want to repeat. This saying is an easy one to remember for tough situations and serves as a quick safety check before saying anything close to a promise that may be misinterpreted by marketing, sales, customers, or other groups that are eager to hear commitments they can act on.

These chapters also had a good overview of prototyping practices for service experimentation, which can be a good resource for Product Managers. Here are also the discussion questions I used for this session if you’re interested in digging deeper into the chapters:

• Do you have an example where a solution had issues because it was not designed with the whole in mind? From the book “The entire purpose of service design blueprinting is to ensure that all the different elements across all touchpoints are not designed in isolation.”
• Do you feel we have any places with particularly good or bad expectation setting? Or have you been the recipient of particularly good or bad expectation seeing? From the book “As customers, we have expectations of a service in terms of quality and value that overarch the day-to-day tasks we undertake. These expectations are set by the brand and our experience of other services, and are closely tied to the amount we are paying.”
• Do you feel we have any touchpoints that are too high in quality? From the book “Sometimes, you may need to consider reducing the quality of a certain touchpoint to enhance the overall experience of quality in the service. When you set consistent expectations in each interaction and fulfill them in the next, people will feel quality.”
• What do you think are some great service measurements that we could be tracking? How could we set a baseline? From the book “However, it is important to define some measurement criteria before a new design is launched and to track these parameters to prove value and improve the service.”