Service pattern people
There is a growing movement in service pattern approaches, which I’ve been interested in since my early work with the design team at FutureGov. You can read more about some of this work and my earlier thinking in service pattern posts on this blog.
I am still regularly contacted about the FutureGov patterns work with Essex County Council. More recently, TPXimpact has worked on patterns approaches, including with policy and operational teams in central government – like this DWP example – and with our teams using pattern-based approaches in a wide range of digital transformation work.
What’s most encouraging is that there is now a growing list of links and references where other organisations and teams have developed or applied service pattern approaches.
Service Week 2025
Last week, TPXimpact hosted a Services Week 2025 event with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The event brought together a panel with great experience, representing examples of work on service patterns from across government and in the third sector. This included Nikola Goger, Head of Design at MoJ; Amy Ricketts, Head of Service Design at Barnardo’s; Kirsty Sinclair, Service Design Lead at the Scottish Government; and Martin Ford-Downes, Lead Service Designer for Prisons Digital at MoJ. Jaskiran Kang, Head of Service and Organisation Design at TPXimpact co-hosted the event with Jen Thomson, Senior Interaction Designer at MoJ.
As FutureGov alumni, it was particularly great to see Amy and Kirsty on the panel who are both leading important work and developing service pattern approaches in their own design teams and organisations.
It was also a shame that Jeanette Clement had to miss the panel at the last minute. Jeanette’s team has been doing their own work on service patterns at EE, building on Jeanette’s previous work developing this approach at the Parliamentary Digital Service.
I haven’t written about this topic much since 2020 – when I spoke about service patterns as the main focus of a talk for Services Week 2020. Since then, I included service patterns as an idea in Multiplied, and have watched as other teams and leaders have taken and developed some of the ideas around working with patterns further.
Here are some of my thoughts on the panel discussion and where I think we are in 2025.
Patterns as strategic service design
It now seems to be more widely understood that patterns are the gateway to sharing and reuse between teams, especially across government. As Nikola explained early in the panel discussion, patterns help us “naturally figure out things that have opportunities to try things around them.” This should be the opportunity to join up work, and for teams to work together around shared goals in new ways.
Martin also talked about the use of patterns in ‘pre-discovery’ – using pattern-based approaches to plan and prioritise work “so services are built on a framework of patterns.”
I thought this was a key point, with one of the best use cases I’ve seen for patterns being as an approach to working with organisations to understand their services, leading into how programmes plan and prioritise.
To expand on this further, I think service patterns are really a way of thinking about how service design practice needs to evolve to meet the needs of organisation change. The reality is that most organisations still need to transform how they work, and how they make better use of technology. There’s a big challenge here for service design to operate effectively at the intersection of user experience and business change. Service pattern approaches demand a much more strategic mindset for looking at systems, and a ‘full stack’ approach when understanding how organisations work and how they operate their services.
Amy made an important point around patterns work being best suited to services that we want to scale and grow… saying: “it’s a process of doing that [at Barnardo’s] which has helped us to understand what we do… understanding what’s common and agreeing definitions for services.”
As Jaskiran also later explained, using service design in more strategic ways enables us to understand services and user journeys across organisations, spotting opportunities to use common patterns. It’s how we can convene and bring people together in ways that might meaningfully support change – finding real scalable efficiencies and savings through reuse.
Making work adaptable and reusable
One thing I was glad to hear from the panel was that patterns shouldn’t replace a design process. As with my previous thinking about how to use service patterns, it continues to be important to see patterns as a starting point, or as a tool set that supports good design.
I really like that Barnardo’s describe patterns work as service modelling. Kirsty also talked about how, at Scottish Government, patterns are used to focus on how they measure the impact of work. This is still about reusable parts people can assemble as needed, including important aspects such as user research. But the key emphasis here is helping people to take actions or to do something.
I’ve also written about this type of approach as service modelling – something that’s active, versus the type of static outputs, blueprints or maps produced in what we might now label as traditional service design work.
Patterns that extend beyond technology
Amy used a great example of Family Hubs at Barnardo’s… How a family support worker role “is a pattern.” Barnardo’s have found that this role is common across a number of support services, with some nuance and local contextualisation always needed. There are competencies and skills to think about as patterns, helping them scale and ensuring quality and consistency over time and across service delivery.
What I thought was exciting about this Barnardo’s example is that it goes beyond digital or technology. It’s about services, service models, and service outcomes. It made me think about the idea of service patterns being a thread that holds together all of our organisations, operations and policy.
This final point is the realisation that more pattern work is now happening beyond digital teams working on technology solutions. The reality was the early Essex work FutureGov set up was a very digital and transactional set of council services. To show how much this has shifted: at the event, Jaskiran explained how recent pattern workshops she has been running for government teams now prioritise direct collaboration with policy teams and professionals, building on the work we’ve supported in places like DWP.
The question of the tech stack
The question of reuse and technology is still where think the value of service patterns is most open to challenge.
I like the direction of the latest prototyping work from the cross government patterns working group. But what I’m less convinced about is how far it’s possible to go with what is often described as a ‘lego bricks’ approach. My worry is we have to push further and further into increasingly complex design systems, documentation and component-based work to achieve real savings here. There’s also a danger that this gets driven too far by the potential of automating design or service delivery through technology – at the cost of how well services meet user needs and compromising overall user experience.
For me, service patterns aren’t about technology solutions, they’re about creating more consistent, scalable services in the most efficient ways as part of a design process. This doesn’t mean that service patterns shouldn’t interact with modular technology approaches. For organisations working with technology in efficient, scalable ways, they should already be thinking about smaller, connected solutions – interoperable applications and components. Any modern tech stack should therefore be highly configurable to service pattern work. The important point is that configuration should be determined by a design process, anchored to real user needs and service context.
I’ve not mentioned AI and automation yet. But, if we are to see the benefits of emerging technologies used to increase efficiencies in service administration, processes and tasks, this needs a foundation of strategic service design work combined with modern technology approaches – where teams integrate tech functionality seamlessly as services scale and adapt over time.
Finding the right level of abstraction
With all the work now happening across different teams and organisations, it’s clear to me that service patterns can be the foundation of a more strategic and full-stack approach to service design. This increasingly brings together what might previously have been labelled as business design and organisation design in different shapes of government and other change programmes.
The key to whether patterns become useful is their level of abstraction. This is what determines if they will be adaptable to a wide range of use cases where there are common tasks, processes, interactions and capabilities – both offline and online. This is also the need for what we can describe as test and learn approaches, scaling and improving services in incremental ways.
With abstraction, Martin made the point in the panel discussion that “a person in prison requesting stuff is similar to buying a phone.” I think that’s a good example. There’s reuse here, even at a more extreme point of abstraction needed to recognise a common pattern. It’s also an example where the underlying tech configuration is likely to have many different considerations with the contrasting use cases, such as security and the types of service interactions that might follow.
I don’t have the first hand experience, but where I’ve read about work such as DWP’s Strategic Reference Architecture programme, I haven’t been convinced that this type of modular approach will create real efficiencies in how services are built or operated. It’s a different type of abstraction problem here, where common tech-based approaches are often abstracted from real use cases. The point of service patterns is that they are always part of how services are being designed. Therefore, there is always (or should be) a real use case. That means a focus on understanding user needs, in a scenario, or in a real life context to design for.
If common tech components are the answer, they must be wrapped in a strategic service design approach. It’s not necessarily one or the other. The difference here is between organising work and teams around reusable technology or working as what is best described as a service organisation. Again, where I have seen technology built most effectively in modular ways, this starts through understanding services, system-level patterns, and what needs to happen, including what is enabled and supported by technology and data sharing.
A big thanks to Jen Thomson who also organised the Services Week event with the TPXimpact team. Karina Lewis has shared a blog with a fantastic set of sketch notes from the event. You can watch the event back on the TPXimpact YouTube channel, and there’s a blog post by Jen and Jaskiran that talks more about some of the panel discussion.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.