From product to a service mindset
Written with contributions and feedback from Mica Moore.
Product is how digital delivery has been established and scaled in most parts of the public sector. It’s the main unit of delivery for change programmes involving technology.
As a set of values or principles, a product mindset is often described as putting user-centricity at the forefront of work, with decisions and agile development being driven by an understanding of users’ needs, behaviours, and pain points. However, in reality, it’s still all too common for teams to use user-centred approaches, but without truly thinking and acting in ways that question the effect decisions have beyond their immediate delivery focus. I first covered this as a theme in Multiplied.
When organisations start to apply a service mindset, then a different type of user-centricity happens, understanding and aligning work beyond product. In terms of digital maturity, it means continuously shaping culture, practices, and processes to focus on broader user outcomes and experiences – in ways that clearly recognise and balance user needs, policy intent, and business goals.
Starting with how organisations define and measure product
A service mindset starts with how an organisation understands its product landscape.
In most organisations there will be a set of assumptions about what products exist, no matter how those are defined and who owns them. But as soon as you look more closely, you’ll see that some products are products, some are services, and some are technologies or business capabilities.
Add to this that there is also unlikely to be a shared definition and understanding of service. And within this, the complexity of products, technologies and capabilities that are being used in multiple service areas.
Mica Moore shared this hypothesis with me earlier this year:
“Any lack of clarity around product and service definitions means organisations aren’t able to effectively scope and define the right things to measure.”
In terms of what gets measured, a service mindset is about enabling seamless, end-to-end journeys over single point in time interactions.
If a product measure starts as the question: Is it easy to use? Applying a service mindset means getting closer to: Is it easy to use [but] in order for a user to achieve their end goal?
With this extended framing, teams can ask different questions, such as:
- Will each user get the right outcome via this product?
- Which service journeys does this product form part of, and how do we ensure it works for each?
- How do information, data, systems and processes need to integrate and interact across different products to enable a great user experience?
The important thing is the service context. It’s therefore hard to reach this level of focus without first having a clear frame of reference for what a product is, what a service is, and the relationships they both have to what an organisation is trying to achieve through its delivery priorities.
Applying a service mindset
The test of a service mindset is that all organisations should be able to say clearly that:
These are our services. This is how they meet a clear user need and a policy intent. And these are the outcomes we need to measure to know whether or not those services are working as intended.
What’s often needed is the necessary work to develop such a service landscape, and to do this in a way that brings together understanding across programmes and leadership layers of an organisation.
Practically, there are some specific aspects to consider here: Firstly, the need to develop a common taxonomy for describing services, including products, capabilities, outcomes and how each relates to the other.
If teams aren’t clear on the language they are using to describe the same things, they can talk at cross purposes, leaving with different ideas and interpretations of what they’re trying to achieve and what success will look like.
Alongside a taxonomy, it can be useful to define a service catalogue. This is the basis for taking the organisation on a journey of what it means to describe work in ways that service users will understand. This is also the starting point of being clear with when a product is a product, or what a business capability is.
Once this type of service taxonomy exists, it allows teams to join up the way they talk about work. They can start to think about whether there’s a clear end-to-end journey defined and understood to deliver the intended outcomes linked to a policy or intended business outcome. That includes looking carefully at the relationship and gaps between any previously understood product landscapes.
While this type of work does take time, as with many user-centred design artefacts, the conversations it will generate along the way are as important to organisational alignment as the end results.
A more transformational approach
What’s described here is the need for a more holistic understanding and alignment of work. But if an organisation already has a strong product function, do they really need to be applying a service mindset in this way?
I think the answer is ‘yes’. It’s the time, space, and mandate needed to zoom out and reframe problem spaces, which is only possible with a clear understanding of broader service, business and policy contexts.
This is especially the case where products are the result of digitised forms or analogue, historical processes. Where the way things work in an organisation has typically grown in complexity over a longer period. It’s even more important to understand what users are actually trying to do, and to join products together into service journeys that are seamless – where users shouldn’t realise they’re completing what would be considered multiple different forms or processes internally.
The complexity of service journeys being pushed to end users is still common in digital work, even when a strong product focus exists. Applying a service mindset means doing the hard work to remove the need for users to choose the right forms, processes and navigate this level of complexity themselves. This is where the power of product and service thinking can really come together – using the tools of user-centred design and agile delivery to focus on a piece of work more strategically in this way.
Building on strong delivery culture
A more holistic focus on services and outcomes shouldn’t be to the detriment of how modern organisations design and build services – including managing risks and dependencies. Product mindset is already shaping delivery capabilities and user-centricity in many organisations, which is something to build on by applying a service mindset.
A culture that embeds a strong product mindset should also already encompass values like cross-functional product ownership, with the potential for more joined-up user journeys. However, to fully succeed, that same shared ownership needs clear definitions and understanding of product landscapes, priorities and the right measures to align work around.
If product teams are already measuring outcomes in a more service and policy-focused way (and some will be), a shared understanding of the service landscape and definitions will help them overcome other obstacles to more joined-up outcomes across different teams and programmes of work.
And with the right strategic focus, moving from product to a service mindset can also help align work across different organisations – a new way of organising – measuring and embedding user-centricity in much more depth, across even broader shared priorities and policy areas.
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.