Jeff Zych

Shifting from a Product-centric to a Service-centric Mindset

Over the past few months I’ve shifted from a product-centric mindset to a service-centric mindset. My focus used to be on building products that help people accomplish a task or goal. That meant I would try to understand the problem to solve, who it’s being solved for, and then design digital products to solve that problem.

But as I’ve grown as a designer, become a manager, and seen Optimizely move into the enterprise market, I’ve realized that a lot more goes into making a product successful than the product itself. Companies often offer additional services to make customers successful.

A service is a touchpoint or system provided by a company to fulfill a need. A touchpoint is how someone uses a service — a website, phone line, ticket kiosk, and so on.

Most digital products, for example, have additional online properties to help customer be successful, like a knowledge base. Companies can also provide non-digital services, such as a support line customers can call or email.

Even though a service may not have a visual interface, they can still be thoughtfully designed. To make good decisions about how these services work, you still need a solid understanding of your users and their goals. This is what product designers do when designing a product, with the only difference being the final deliverable is not a visual interface.

Shifting to a service mindset makes it obvious that new technologies that have invisible UIs, like Alexa and Operator, can be thought of as services and designed just like any other service. In its simplest form, design is the act of making thoughtful decisions. Having empathy and understanding a user’s goals, motivations, and context help designers make thoughtful decisions. These activities apply to services and invisible UIs just as much as creating visual interfaces.

On top of that, all of the products and services that a company offers its customers need to work in concert with each other. This means that it isn’t enough for each product and service to be well-designed on its own — they also need to be designed to seamlessly work together to make customers successful. Doing this also requires having a broad understanding of your customers.

When I had a product-centric mindset I was aware of the different touchpoints, but I hadn’t put much effort into designing them all as a cohesive, interrelated experience. Customers may use the knowledge base and email support while using the product, but that’s for the support team to manage. “I’m just going to make the product great because that’s all that customers need to be successful,” I used to think. I’ve since learned that isn’t true. It takes more than the product itself to make customers successful.

Learning about the discipline of service design has helped me connect all the different touchpoints customers use into one unified framework. Everything is a service — products included. And they can all be thoughtfully designed by using the core skills designers already have. By doing so, customers will have a better experience with your products and services, which will make them more successful, and that will ultimately make your company more successful.

If you’re interested in learning more about service design, these books and articles have taught me a lot:

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