Every purpose has infinite service possibilities
Every service has a purpose, but for every purpose, there are infinite possible services.
So how do we pick a service that will deliver our purpose?!
When I was writing bad services I thought a lot about what the ‘biggest cause’ for services not working was. While there isn’t just one cause (the smallest number of problems I could condense it down to was 5! the one issue that came the closest to being the number one culprit for bad services is that we don’t know why we’re delivering our service in the first place.
We always say at the School, ‘your user defines what your service is’ for a very good reason. A service is something that helps someone to do something. It's that ‘someone’ who defines what that ‘something’ is.
Even if we’ve told our user that they need to do something (as is the case with a lot of public services like paying tax), it's our user’s own language and understanding of the task at hand that they will use to search for that task, and their goal that will mean that they string a collection of other products, systems and tools together as a ‘service’ to get to that end goal.
But if it’s our user who defines what our service is, how do we choose whether or nor we should provide that service, or someone else should? What is the right way of delivering that purpose?
If you’ve ever tried to design a service without knowing what that service was supposed to achieve beyond ‘making money’, you’ll know that is incredibly difficult. Which users do you target? Why? What are you offering them? These questions are impossible to answer if you dont know what the service is for.
If your goal is just to make money, the most effective way to do this without the expense, risk and effort of making anything yourself is by simply investing in other companies. There is always a reason in addition to pure unadulterated profit that guides the direction of that profiteering.
It's that purpose that drives what direction we’re going in, but although every service has a purpose, for every purpose, there are infinite possible ways we could deliver that as a service, so how do we pick?
If we’re a business that wants to promote swimming, do we publish maps of safe wild-swimming locations? Are we an inclusive swimwear company? Or do we make swimming pools? Likewise with public services, there is always a reason why we are providing that grant/license/ support/ regulation. If we want to reduce homelessness, do we provide housing? Housing grants? Regulated rental? A soup kitchen?
For every purpose like promoting swimming or reducing homelessness, there are almost infinite possible services that will deliver that purpose. So, how we choose to deliver that purpose as a service (or multiple services) will depend on lots of things.
The key is understanding what we want to achieve. Once we know what we want to achieve, we can think about:
What do we have the skills to do?
What do our users expect from us?
What can other organisations in our industry provide/ where are there potential market or service gaps?
Where will we bring the biggest value for the least investment?
Does your service struggle with a lack of direction or purpose?
If so, check out chapter one of bad services, out now and our podcast episode on purpose