How to fix broken systems - Kate Tarling (CEO, The Service Group)

I find that even if you have a brilliant team doing, like, having just an amazing work, they will be hampered time and time again by how the organization works or doesn't work so well around them. The first mistake is imagining that the status quo is the neutral safe. The first mistake is you're not necessarily at all in that safe neutral place to begin with that you think you might be. But generally, products tend to be more clearly delineated. The emphasis tends to be on the thing itself on that product as opposed to that more kind of end to end service. And any service might have a number of products or it might not. One other version of this that you can do is when you're in a situation of getting a lot of requests coming in externally or by the business, you can set up a a triage function, enforces a sort of describe the problem and the outcome you're after, before you're gonna get past the first post. It's an entire collection of legacy technology, modern technology, outsourced services, third party services and products, in house products, some things that are more product like, some things that just exist and were built or were brought in by some ancient decision and and have never gone away. So it's a much messier reality. I would suggest starting not by trying to change the entire organization at once, but starting in one area, being really clear about what some of the issues are, what our customers are doing, what do we not want to happen, and starting to put in place different mechanisms to change that. Hi, Kate. How are you doing? Welcome to The Product Experience. Hi. It's a real pleasure to be here with you. And we're gonna be talking about service organizations today. But before we get stuck into our topic, it would be great if you could give our listeners a quick intro to who you are and what you do. I was gonna say in product, but you're kind of more on the service side. So what you do in service design? Yeah. Sure. And, yeah, that's a we can get more into into why I think that way. But these days, I do a lot of consultancy with large service providing and product providing organizations. I do a lot of training and workshops and, talks mostly with leadership and executives within those organizations, And I do writing of articles and a newsletter and, of course, the book, the service organisation. Tell us a bit more about your background. How did you get into this world of helping service organisations get better at reading? So it started almost in my early career. So I've always worked in organisations that were doing interesting things to do with the Internet, even in the, you know, early days of sort of the very early February, late nineteen nineties. And I first worked in a …