Don't Fix What Ain't Broke
Your teams are underwater AND burning out. I'm not sure how those metaphors work together, but you know exactly what I mean. Calendars are packed, meetings start late and run long, key folks aren't available, people are quietly steaming off-camera. They'd rather be working than sitting on a call. And you wish they could skip it, too.
What started as a streamlined, efficient process turned into a literal nightmare. Teams find themselves trapped by process, beholden to ceremonies that feel sacred because "this is how it's done" even though the meetings have morphed into something unrecognizable and ineffective, if not simply exhausting. In a last ditch effort you cut folks from invite lists and declare, "No-meeting Wednesdays!"
Your workflow needs to change, but the idea of replacing your entire process feels impossible. And it probably IS impossible. But it's also not necessary. The question isn't "what new process should we adopt?" It's "what improvements will unlock efficiency?"
This is service design. More than just designing customer experiences, it’s also designing how your organization works to create those experiences.
Understanding How You Work
The first step in any meaningful improvement is assessment. Not just how your products serve customers, but how your business operates internally. How ideas come to life. How teams are structured. How decisions get made. How work product flows between functions. How collaboration happens (or why it doesn't).
Most organizations find themselves focused exclusively on customer-facing feature improvements and operational emergencies. This is the firefighting I'm always talking about: high-priority, immediate, and overwhelming. Firefighting makes it impossible to consider the broader realities that determine whether anything more meaningful or actually innovative can make it out the door.
Understanding your operational landscape (the real organizational constraints, capabilities, and culture) is where transformation begins.
Small Shifts For Massive Value
A few things you might consider, without blowing up your existing process:
Meetings require agendas. Not exactly revolutionary, but most folks in most companies don't include an agenda in their meeting invites. This is a small change with massive impact. Share the reason and goals for every single meeting. Open each meeting with a personal touch before reiterating the agenda. Then keep it on track. Note and sidebar topics outside the scope of the agenda. This enables people to prioritize, prepare for, and focus on the meeting. It’s also really considerate.
Cameras on. Decades ago, I would buy and mail webcams to clients. The tech challenges then were real, but the benefits obvious. Now, video is easy, consistent, and everyone's already set up. Remote teams with a cameras-on culture have a much more positive, collaborative working dynamic. Be the first person in your org with camera on, encourage your peers and leaders. At first, it feels awkward and bold, and then eventually inspires others to join you. I avoid posing mandates, but I do insist folks who are presenting have camera on. Body language - it's invaluable.
Listen to your customers. Are you engaging them, are you listening? Is it a recurring segment in your program lifecycle? Sadly, it’s missing at most organizations. And to be clear, I'm talking about frequent qualitative research as a complement to your platform data, customer surveys, and reviews. You need to be literally speaking with customers on a regular basis. I'm sure you agree it's important in theory, but finding time (and money) for it can seem impossible. I'll address that in a moment.
Release control. As soon as you start listening to customers, problems opportunities flood in. This requires enhanced program planning. It's not just about prioritizing what to work on, but how. Invite broader team-lead participation into your program planning. Leverage everyone's expertise, spread the burden, and share ownership. People will become personally invested, natural advocates, and champions for the cause.
Be Guided By Customers
I mention listening to customers above as a "small shift" because I think it's easy for folks to agree to this in theory. The mental shift is small. Implementation is big.
Most digital product teams operate entirely in delivery mode, fueled by institutional knowledge, deep expertise, and gut-level intuition. Build, ship, measure, repeat. But without direct customer input, freedom to explore, and willingness to fail, you will never truly deliver innovative solutions.
The discovery track (as I like to call it) is where ideas take shape, prototypes come to life, and customers instantly prove our concepts successful or not. This track of continuous exploration operates in parallel with your existing Agile delivery track, complementing it, feeding it. This dual-track approach is based on the fail-fast principles from Lean UX and continuous delivery of SAFe Agile. Nothing new, but rarely implemented or implemented effectively.
Adding a discovery track of work on top of what you're already doing sounds impossible, and my suggestion doesn't sound any more feasible: dedicate 20% of your delivery capacity to discovery.
Don't laugh.
It may seem counterintuitive to pull resources away from shipping. But when you validate concepts before building them, you get requirements so articulate that downstream delivery work accelerates exponentially. I've done it many times with clients ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises, growth stage companies, and start-ups alike.
One Extreme Example
I joined a rather complex fintech platform team drowning in feature requests and technical debt. Their designers were perpetually behind, forever the bottleneck. Product had a huge backlog of stories, mostly prescriptive solutions short on details and rationale. On the other side of design, engineering was begging for mockups, anything they could execute against. Design was stuck in the middle, doing whatever was asked as quickly as possible, missing edge cases, and reworking what had been delivered the sprint before.
We didn't replace their process. We enhanced it.
We carved out a small team: a product owner, lead designer, front-end developer. A balanced team focused on a feature with clear customer desirability, technical feasibility, and business viability. We initiated a google-style "design sprint" that resulted in a user-validated functional prototype. Stakeholders were pleased and the discovery track established.
Within two quarters, everyone had found their rhythm and the results were evident. Not because people worked harder, but because validated concepts meant:
Product wrote detailed delivery track requirements based on discovery track evidence
UX teams focused on solving interaction edge cases with minimal core revisions
Visual design and copy applied and evolved brand standards with fewer, sharper iterations
Frontend engineering received robust, thoughtful design assets to implement efficiently
Testing and research continued through implementation, fueling continuous discovery
That 20% investment in discovery eliminated the downstream thrash that had been killing velocity. Product had more strategic options to consider, with greater confidence. Design was excited to explore bigger ideas, and the production pace steadied. Engineering was at full capacity with far fewer concerns and conflicts. The entire program team was better able to focus on the needs of the business and customers. Ultimately, leadership got the results they needed: faster time-to-market, reduced rework costs, and measurably improved customer satisfaction.
This is a single example of the application of service design. You don't have to do exactly this, to this degree. Most of my design peers are surprised to learn I have fully installed this dual-track framework for multiple clients. It's a way of working many of us aspire to, but it's really hard to implement in full. More often, organizations largely keep doing what they're doing, making minor adjustments, testing what process changes make sense, and continue to evolve closer to the ideal over time.
People First, Process Second
I didn't invent this approach, and it's not a one-size-fits-all, all-or-nothing solution. While these service design principles have been proven across countless organizations, what makes it work isn't the tracks of work, the ceremonies, or turning your cameras on. The key is a tireless dedication to better understanding people, both the folks on your teams and your customers.
Whether you need embedded partnership to implement these shifts, fractional leadership to guide them, or strategic advisory to envision them, the goal is the same: help your teams work better.
Figure out what is working, and don't fix what ain't broke.