I was recently watching an episode of Bluey with my toddler. For the unacquainted, Bluey is a children’s cartoon series that revolves around a Blue Australian cattle dog named Bluey and her family and friends. The show nails storytelling and offers plenty of lessons for both kids and parents. As a certified Bluey fan, I often watch long after my child has moved on. The show masterfully addresses challenging topics like separated families, infertility, and neurodivergence. Some lessons that complement design work–like being “yes, and…” engaging in play, and embracing failure.
In this episode, called Shops, Bluey and her friends are making up the rules to an imagined game, roleplaying a scene from a shop checkout. At the outset, Bluey’s friend Mackenzie, in addition to his enthusiasm to play “shops”, expresses concern about the ability of the group of friends to make quick decisions. As they start making initial decisions about the setting, props, and roles, an impatient Mackenzie jumps in, eager to kickstart the game. Bluey halts him. His zeal to start playing is repeatedly met with Bluey stopping him to ensure they have nailed down the details. She wants to make sure everyone knows their roles and actions but ends up reconsidering those decisions and then ends up reimagining the entire setup. Mackenzie’s urgency to begin is continually met with Bluey’s desire to be thorough before starting.
Just as the group feels like they’ve (finally) gotten all the details, Mackenzie attempts to start playing…and Bluey identifies a missing detail. They don’t have a prop for money–and the cycle of reconsidering the details repeats. Frustrated by the constant cycle of decision-making, Mackenzie quits playing. The turning point happens when Bluey invites Mackenzie back to the game. They express their perspectives: Mackenzie feels that Bluey keeps adding unnecessary details, while Bluey feels Mackenzie is rushing to start before key elements are settled.
Despite being a children’s show, this narrative mirrors real-world challenges in service or product design activation–bringing prototypes and actual services to customers. Bringing a new service to market is always motivated by some underlying drivers. There are outcomes that the sponsoring group is interested in unlocking, often including customer value as a central focus.
Like Bluey, the stereotypical designer is perceived as being bent on getting the service right in every detail – rigorous about value being delivered perfectly in every single moment. Like Mackenzie, the stereotypical business manager is intensely aware of the internal pressures of the organization (demonstrating speed to market, ROI, etc.) and often external market pressures (increasing competition, changing market, etc.). One view can be perceived as overthinking or overengineering, and the other can be seen as constantly applying time and scope pressure. A recognition that neither is complete and that both roles are necessary allows for the design of something better and more holistically considered – incorporating the needs of different service actors, the stakeholders, and the business.
When it comes to putting service offerings in front of customers, it’s important to find the balance between being reckless and overcalculated.
Businesses care about speed to market, but speed isn’t the only thing they care about. They also care about the value realized by customers (especially if human-centered design approaches are involved). If a team moves quickly without considering the system’s quality—its consistency, continuity, and coherence—even a desirable concept may fail to deliver value to the end user.
On the flip side, if a team is overly cautious about getting everything “right,” they may miss their window of opportunity—whether by running out of budget, being outpaced by competitors, or, worst of all, losing the trust of key stakeholders.
For a team, making these tradeoffs without getting bogged down or impatient is challenging. Even more, bringing services to life is hard work.
The design and business perspectives share common ground, but in practice—particularly in less mature teams—it can often feel like a side needs to be picked. This one-dimensional view can be detrimental to doing good service design work. In contrast, both perspectives are necessary and lead to a more holistic result. Achieving this balance requires team members to stay open to each other’s perspectives.
Service designers (or experienced orchestrators) should listen closely to colleagues who have a deep understanding of the business, both internally and externally. They recognize what the business is hoping to gain and can illuminate not only why speed to value is important, but also help make the right trade-offs so your learning and scaling is efficient.
Business managers on the team should be attentive to the counsel of service design counterparts. Service designers can uncover the details of the service and see how they connect to form a continuous and consistent whole. They recognize the impact of the tradeoffs to value realized by the customer’s experience with the service. If you are rash while building, you leave yourself open to unintentional gaps in the experience that will take longer to close when they become apparent.
Inviting people unfamiliar with the service—whether internal stakeholders, colleagues, or external participants—to ask questions can provide valuable insights for evaluating the solution. It is easy to get so caught up in building that we forget to zoom out and critique whether we are on track to delivering value for both customers and the business. In articulating “why” we are building what we are, we can uncover how much the solution has been complicated or oversimplified. It’s important to use outcomes to guide what’s being built. Checking the results of the build against those outcomes then allows right-sizing efforts.
A North Star vision of the service will help your team get aligned on what the future of the experience will be. A North Star vision is a communication of the future via stories and frameworks that gives you something ambitious to work towards and for others to get excited about, but it also creates a language for the experience that your team can rally around.
Evolution plans can help you determine and right size efforts the team is taking on. An evolution plan is a framework that we use at Harmonic to depict how the experience manifests at different time horizons and the organizational capabilities that are needed at each horizon to deliver the intended experience. An evolution plan doesn’t always have to be fully detailed, but not having one at all can introduce the risk of making impulsive decisions along the way.
Together, the North Star vision and evolution plan serve as stepping stones toward the team’s true goal—the first iteration of the service. They allow the team to back into what is being prototyped or built, whether a market test or a Minimum Viable Service. Whichever it is, the iteration needs to be well-defined. The team needs to be aligned on the size and shape of the system being built.
This work can take some time–especially to align–and likely will lead to redefining and refining, but is well worth it to save time and effort in the short and long term!
Service designers employ a multitude of tools, from service blueprints to journey maps and evolution plans. Each of these tools has a specific underlying intention. For example, service blueprints are a system that captures how an organization will operationalize the envisioned experience and what capabilities are needed to do so. It’s important to recognize that each of these tools is in service of getting to certain outcomes. As a result of defining what the intended outcomes are, the team can determine how deep to go into each tool or method. Customizing or tweaking tools to fit your team’s needs allows you to right-size your efforts. Do “just enough” to get to the outcomes efficiently, but leave enough scaffolding, space, and buy-in to revisit and build on it in future iterations.
In practice, it’s not a simple task to bring a service to life in the form of a prototype and even less so in the form of a minimum viable service (or any iteration thereafter). It is complicated, complex, and unnerving. You are dealing with a system that needs careful consideration. You are usually building to a deadline while keeping organizational pressures at bay. But the important thing is to be mindful of the balance we need to strike. Spend time only on tradeoffs that matter to your outcomes (and have collaborative ways to discuss them).
In the episode, Bluey and Mackenzie eventually understand each other’s perspective and how their approaches are causing friction. Mackenzie agrees to wait until Bluey is ready, and Bluey promises not to delay. This compromise is a great example of how communication and empathy can smooth out conflicting priorities. Collaboration between designers and business managers is key for teams working on service activation. By openly discussing each other’s concerns—whether it’s speed or quality—you can make better decisions together. Finding time for these conversations allows teams to strike the right balance, moving with a sense of urgency without sacrificing the value delivered to customers.
By fostering empathy for different perspectives and leveraging frameworks to guide iterations, teams can craft a well-considered service that delivers value to all stakeholders—on time.
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