Designing and operating user centered digital services - Jeff Sussna

Designing and Operating  
User-Centered Digital Services

Jeﬀ Sussna 
Ingineering.IT 
@jeﬀsussna

@jeffsussnaCopyright © 2015 Ingineering.IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Me: IT consultant/design thinker

Practice: IT transformation 
Career: Dev/QA/Ops 
Background: liberal arts

A method for user-centeredness

Empathy 
Ethnography 
Abduction 
Iteration

“Solving wicked problems”

-Horst Rittel

“Changing existing situations into preferred ones”

-Herbert Simon

“Welcome to Digital Service 101”

1-day “design/IT/business” seminar 
History, philosophy, economics, biology (and computer science)

Information Technology -> Interaction Technology

IT includes digital design and product management

What will we learn?

A holistic approach digital service quality 
A common design/operations language 
How to evaluate, adapt, and improve methodologies 
New ways of thinking and working across boundaries

Agenda

Talking, discussing, designing: 
-Post-Industrial IT 
-Continuous Quality 
-A Language for Continuous Design

From industrialism to post-industrialism

Service economy

Knowledge work

Change and innovation as the new purpose

Pervasive computerization

Post-industrialism in the 21st century

Products -> services

Things -> experiences 
Transactions -> relationships 
Convincing -> understanding

Silos -> infusion

Is the coffee shop for chatting or working? 
Is your phone for calls/photos/email? 
Is your car a car or a Spotify client?

Complicated -> complex

Is your car radio Honda’s fault or Spotify’s? 
Is online customer subscription management SoE or SoR? 
Is your data managed by Freshbooks or Heroku or AWS? 
Do your customers call your support line or just complain on Twitter?

Complexity is counterintuitive

Emergence 
Cascading failure 
Sensitivity to history

Eﬃciency -> adaptability

Kodak lasted 100 years before being disrupted 
Microsoft lasted 30 years 
Apple went from the world’s most valuable company to a ? in 1 year

Brand promise shifts from delivery to conversation

The old business imperative

Engineer scale, robustness, predictability 
Push product and message

The new business imperative

Navigate complexity 
Co-create product and message

Our day

How does the new business imperative challenge old methods? 
How can new methods help us satisfy it?

Warm-up exercise

Where do you experience infusion and complexity? 
How does it break down old methods? 
What new challenges does it pose?

A New Model of Control

Jeﬀ Sussna 
Ingineering.IT 
@jeﬀsussna

What is business? Control
Proﬁt, market share, stock price 
Product quality, customer satisfaction 
Operational efﬁciency, employee behavior  
…

Industrialism: the age of control

Taylorism
Time/motion studies -> standardized activities 
Separation of planning/management from execution

The problems with industrial control
Product-centric 
Efﬁciency/scale over adaptability 
Radical separation of planning from execution  
Assumes predictability

We need a new, post-industrial model of control

Cybernetics: kybernetes, “good steering”

Lean Startup as a cybernetic methodology

Product development: predict the customer’s trajectory 
MVP: calibrate your aim 
Pivot: adjust your prediction

“Cybernetics needs to be applied to itself”

-Margaret Mead

“The cybernetics of observing systems”

-Heinz von Foerster

Autopoiesis

self-creation / self-production

Structural coupling

Internal organization corresponds to external environment 
No ﬂies, no frog

Self-steering

Continual internal/external adaptation

So what?

How do you even spell “autopoiesis”?!

Business is a process of continual self-production

Employees + systems + materials = products 
Products + sales = revenue 
Revenue pays for employees + systems + materials 
…

Companies succeed through structural coupling

Wrong product, wrong price, wrong market… = “death”

The post-industrial economy -

Service 
Infusion 
Complexity 
Disruption
- demands self-steering

The cybernetic insight

Life/business is a never-ending process of adaptation

“I like cybernetics: its intrinsic circularity helps me
see myself through the eyes of the other.”

-Heinz von Foerster

IT As a Conversational Medium

Jeﬀ Sussna 
Ingineering.IT 
@jeﬀsussna

Infusion makes IT critical to brand as conversation

Impedance mismatch: IT as industrial control aid

We need a post-industrial model/purpose for IT
IT as a medium for empathic conversation

Interaction Technology: how companies converse
With customers 
Among themselves

Conversational IT

Integrates building blocks with shared cybernetic roots and purpose 
Understanding that foundation is key to effective action

Agile

The grandfather of cybernetic IT

Agile’s identity crisis
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software” - what? 
“We value <X> over <YY>” - why?

“Agile processes harness change  
for the customer's competitive advantage"

Agile optimizes for steering

Requirements 
Implementation 
Prioritization 
Process

Agile does not optimize for speed

…or efﬁciency 
…or predictability 
Resist the temptation to re-industrialize

Agile doesn’t actually deliver value to anyone

Enter DevOps

What is DevOps, anyway?!

Digital service: functionality and operability are inseparable 
DevOps treats them as a uniﬁed problem

The Three Ways of DevOps

Flow 
Feedback 
Continuous Experimentation and Learning

The DevOps Way of Feedback

Infrastructure 
Application 
Behavior 
Change 
All layers impact UX

How do you steer infrastructure?

Expensive, physical, complicated: slow/risky 
Enter cloud: dynamic capacity 
Cloud also optimizes for steering

Microservices

Reduces friction for external delivery and internal adaptation  
“a new organizational model as much as a new architectural model" 
Brings the self-steering business to life

Common ingredient: small batch sizes

Work 
Change 
Structure 
Dependency

Small batch sizes -> rapid feedback loops

Rapid feedback loops -> precise steering

Beyond engineering: taking service seriously

Service Design

Design thinking applied to services 
Holistic internal-external understanding 
Pervasive user-centeredness

Self-steering happens through service

Your company is a service 
IT is a service 
The practice of design (or dev or QA or ops) is a service 
A microservice is a service 
Everything is service (design)

Design (what should come next) becomes
operations

Operations (what happens now) becomes design

Design becomes continuous

IT as conversational medium enables a circular design/operations loop

How do you ensure IT drives useful conversations?

Design for service, not just software:
Start with the customer’s needs 
Address experience across touchpoints and time 
Treat employees as customers

Minimize latency, maximize feedback:

Extend the mantra of Lean throughout the lifecycle 
Design signals, not just features 
Apply to internal and external relationships

Design for failure, operate to learn:

Design for resilience 
Use failure as information 
Incorporate entire “UX stack”

Use operations as input to design:

Seek out operational insight 
Expose internal and external interactions 
Listen to reality -> act on what you hear

Seek empathy:

Approach everything you do as user-centered design  
Use operations to better understand the customer’s perspective

Exercise

How do we get from here to there? (everyone has a legacy)

A New Definition of Quality

Jeff Sussna 
Ingineering.IT 
@jeffsussna

Agenda

-(Post-Industrial IT aka digital business) 
-Continuous Quality 
-A Language for Continuous Design

What does continuous design mean for quality?

Success as useful conversation with customers and each other

Conversation/steering happens via service
Companies 
IT organizations 
Design, development, operations 
Microservices

What is the real meaning of service?

Software product quality

“The software meets the spec.”

Software service quality

"The service helps customers accomplish their jobs-to-be-done"

Service value is co-created in use

Customers “hire” services to help them accomplish jobs-to-be-done

"The product is the trip."

-AirBnb designer

Goods-dominant logic

Producers create value via goods 
Value is exchanged for money 
Consumers destroy value via use

Service-dominant logic

Mutual service exchange 
Value co-creation through job-to-be-done satisfaction

Service-dominant logic points us toward:

Systems thinking 
Conversation 
Steering  
Empathy

Goods-dominant -> service-dominant logic

Captures the essence of industrial -> post-industrial shift  
The most important and difﬁcult mindset shift to make 
Applies at all levels: company, team/person, microservice

Exercise

Who is your customer? 
What is their job-to-be-done? 
What help do they need to accomplish it?

Building Quality In

Jeﬀ Sussna 
Ingineering.IT 
@jeﬀsussna

How do we assure service, not just software
quality?

Four dimensions of service

Outcomes 
Access 
Coherency 
Continuity

Outcomes

Do the elements work correctly? 
Are they usable? Do they ﬁt into my workﬂow? 
Do they help me accomplish my job-to-be-done? 
Goes beyond validation

Access

Can I use the service how and when I need to? 
Performance, scalability, security, visibility…

Access depends on humans not just systems

Biz/tech operations staff are customers too 
“Running the service” helps me accomplish my goals

Access is about repair not just prevention

Failure is inevitable in complex systems 
Solving problems contributes to customer satisfaction

Coherency

Does the service address my entire journey? 
Does my experience hang together? 
Does it integrate with the surrounding context?

Continuity

Does the service evolve along with me and my world? 
Bugs, improvements, evolution… 
Dev/test becomes part of service delivery

Steering happens here

Employee journeys evolves in response to customer journeys 
Employee journeys evolve in response to each other 
e.g., DevOps/Design Thinking adoption

Managing change becomes a UX concern

Releasing a new feature triggers employee and customer journeys 
Need to design across time, not just space

A new deﬁnition of quality demands a new
approach to QA

Industrial QA

End of the assembly line 
Tail wagging the dog 
Focus on software not service

Post-industrial QA

Validation and correction become part of creation 
Cybernetics build error detection into aim/ﬁre 
Continuous design: design becomes operations becomes testing

Post-industrial QA

Validation and correction become part of creation 
Continuous design: design becomes operations becomes testing

Complexity changes operations

Operations becomes “searching for failure”  
Prod becomes test (?!?!?!)

Adaptation changes planning

A/B testing, canary releases, incremental feature surfacing 
Prod becomes test again!

Quality becomes continuous

Across time and space: design -> dev -> ops 
QA shifts left and right

Whither the QA department?

Help the organization see the four dimensions of service quality

QA’s new role

Advocate for feedback 
Antidote to cognitive bias 
Advocate for the customer 
Advocate for service-dominant logic

Discussion

How do the four dimensions of service impact your approach to QA? 
How might a post-industrial QA “organization” look?

A Language for Continuous Design

Jeﬀ Sussna 
Ingineering.IT 
@jeﬀsussna

How do we design and operate user-centered
digital services?

We need something that helps us:

Navigate complexity 
Unify design and operations 
Exchange service with customers 
Achieve continuous quality

We need a “speciﬁcation language” for continuous
design…

“I promise I’ll clean my room before dinner.”

Intention

Expression

Intensity

Beneﬁt

“A strongly-stated intention to provide service”

Why “promise”?

Promises aren’t always kept

“A strongly-stated intention to provide service 
that may or may not come to pass”

Real-world systems

Collections of autonomous agents collaborating through promises

Acknowledging uncertainty enables greater
certainty

Acknowledging uncertainty -> greater certainty

Auto-scaling 
Circuit breakers 
Continuous integration 
Design-for-fail

Treating agents as autonomous enables greater
scalability, resilience, and steerability

Needs + promises > requirements

Microservices 
Self-organizing teams 
Scaling agile

“Thinking in promises”

What promises should (can) we make? 
What promises do we need from others? 
What can we do to maximize trust? (by keeping/repairing our promises) 
What promises do our customers need to keep?

What is the traveler’s job-to-be-done?

To get checked in with the hotel computer? 
To make the transition from travel & stress to rest & relaxation

The failure stems from making the wrong promise

Promise thinking models continuous design

Service, not just software 
Design for failure, operate to learn 
Operations as input to design

Promise thinking models holistic service delivery

Physical and digital 
Social and technical 
Design and operations 
Macro and micro 
Internal and external

I promise to help you rest as part of your trip

I promise to…

…give a great talk on Promise Theory 
…show my kids a good time on vacation 
…close the deal and make my quarterly sales numbers

I promise to help you reserve a satisfactory room

I promise to be available when you want to use me 
I promise to be functional and usable 
I promise not to lose your reservation 
I promise to keep your information secure

I promise to help you transition from travel to rest

I promise to be clean, attractive, and navigable 
I promise to be friendly and helpful 
I promise to give you a place to store your luggage

I promise to help you get the guest checked in

I promise to be available when you want to use me 
I promise to be functional and usable 
I promise to ﬁnd the customer’s information quickly

I promise to support your larger service context

I promise to help you ﬁnd a suitable restaurant 
I promise to help you keep in touch with the ofﬁce

I promise to help you operate the business

I promise to understand your (customers’) changing needs 
I promise to continuously deliver operations system improvements 
I promise to help you understand and adopt system changes

I promise to unify functionality and operability

I promise to deliver secure code 
I promise to design for operations 
I promise to reduce deployment friction 
I promise to collaborate to solve shared problems

Promise Thinking Exercise

What is the customer’s promise-to-be-kept?  
How do we help them keep their promise? 
-Physical/digital 
-Front ofﬁce/back ofﬁce 
-Social/technical

Promise thinking process

What promises do we need to make? 
What promises do we need made to us? 
How do we maximize our ability to keep our promises? 
-resilience in the face of broken promises 
-repair of our own broken promises

Use service-dominant logic at all levels

Model the organization from the customer in 
Address all four dimensions of service, not just software

Design across domains

Physical/digital 
Front ofﬁce/back ofﬁce 
Social/technical 
Design/development/QA/operations/support

Using promise thinking

Focus on conversations not artifacts 
Apply to systems, processes, orgs, people 
Incorporate all four dimensions of service 
Start where you are 
Be curious and open 
Design continuously

Promise thinking is…

…the language of continuous design 
…what happens when Service design meets DevOps meets complexity

Promise thinking powers self-steering

Are we keeping our promises (to customers/to each other)? 
Are we making the right promises? 
How do we repair broken promises? 
…by continually changing existing into preferred

In conclusion…

Want more?

www.ingineering.it 
jes@ingineering.it 
@jeffsussna

Designing and operating user centered digital services - Jeff Sussna

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Designing and operating user centered digital services - Jeff Sussna