Complex organisations, simple services

In every organisation I’ve worked in, when I’ve shared a success story from outside, someone has told me, “Yes I can see how that worked there, but things are different here.”

They believe their services are more complicated, the user needs are more nuanced, the system is more complex.

In the same way you can choose whether to tell yourself a positive or a negative story about something that happened; you can choose whether to surface organisational complexity in your products and services. Or you can choose to do the hard work to make it simple.

Complexity exists in every organisation. Even the best organisational design won't remove it because people, and the ways they work together, are complex.

When designing services it’s easy to fall into the trap of getting caught up in the complexity of the wider organisation. You can find yourself lost in every loop in the user journey, every different use case, every possible need a user might have, every stakeholder opinion. The job here isn’t to design a clever system to deal with every possible scenario. It’s to keep the service as simple as possible while solving commercially viable problems for your users.

The more features you build into your service, the more dependencies there are, and the more complicated it becomes to continuously improve.

Speak to your users, understand their needs. Get clarity on the business goals you’re aiming to achieve. Understand the space your service exists in, then strip it right back - what are the most important problems to solve, what is going to create commercial benefit for your organisation, what is your market advantage? Get clear on your focus. And protect its simplicity at all costs.