The Human-Centered Op Model
Working backwards from the customer experience is the most scalable way of organising and aligning people, process and technology to serve their needs, even in highly complex and large scale initiatives. Done right, it can help you avoid waste, track progress and deliver great results. Read on to learn how I devised and applied this operating model at Google.
Back in 2010, Zahaan Bharmal, a Google Exec who grew up dreaming of space had a radical idea to inspire students about the Universe.
It involved taking the world’s classrooms into space. Using Youtube.
In the typical Google fashion of the time, Zahaan commissioned a poster to bring his idea to life and posted copies of it around kitchen areas and high traffic corridors across Google Campuses to generate buzz.
The folk at Google Creative Lab, the innovation hub that showcased the power of Google technologies, picked up the challenge and in early 2011, I got a call from Tea Uglow, the Lab’s Executive Creative Director in London and Lee Hunter, Youtube’s Global Head of Brand.
Tea needed an Executive Producer to help her realise Zahaan’s ambition.
She warned that it would be challenging, requiring the organisation of many hundreds if not thousands of people and dozens of teams across the world.
It would involve most of the big space agencies, including NASA, ESA, JAXA and ROSCOSMOS.
Corporate sponsors would be clamouring to get on board, whilst a host of production companies, creative agencies, filmmakers, celebrities and astronauts would all need careful coordination.
I jumped at the chance.
“When do I start?”
“Monday”
I was buzzing with excitement, but as I put the phone down and was starting to map out everything I had heard on paper, a deluge of questions started stacking up.
- How did Space Agencies manage their workloads? Did they use approaches like Agile or did they think and work in other ways?
- How could you create and maintain alignment with Celebrities, their Agents or Astronauts? In fact, how would you even communicate with an Astronaut? Are there such things as space phones?
- When Tea mentioned that Zahaan wanted to take the classroom into space did he mean literally shooting kids into space?
I spent a while listing all the key questions and prioritising them until I got to the biggest, gnarliest question of all.
As the new Executive Producer of Youtube Space Lab, how was I going to align some of the most sophisticated companies and well-trained people in the world to achieve this vision?
What kind of Operating Model would help all those people understand what we were collectively trying to achieve whilst making it clear what their role was in this grand scheme?
There were simply too many people and existing ways of working for retraining to be an option.
So with this challenge in mind, I got together with my partner-in-crime Andy Weir and we explored a series of ideas about how to best create a system of alignment and organisation.
And so, the Human-Centred Operating Model was born.
Working backwards from the customer
The idea was simple.
Everything would work backwards from the simplest version of the experience we wanted our customer — all those students from around the world — to enjoy.
By focusing everyone on the one thing we wanted students to do at each stage of the competition, we could create alignment as people were onboarded to the initiative and then maintain alignment as the initiative progressed.
Below is the timeline we created to introduce and align people to the idea. The timeline was developed after we kicked off the initial portion of the initiative which involved a Digital competition submission process to put forward ideas of science experiments to send into space.
Viewing this timeline “bottom-up” and starting with the blue boxes you can see how we set out the key customer journeys at each stage of the competition.
For example, in the first box on the left, you can see that once the idea submission stage was complete, we wanted students to “View experiments” and “Look at Discover Space playlists”.
Everyone we engaged to support each stage of the initiative could instinctively understand where they would need to contribute their people and capabilities to create the features that would make up these end-to-end journeys, whether they were Digital features, or processes, information or technologies.
In effect, this allowed us to map organisations and teams to this framework.
Team of Teams
At the centre of our Operating Model we had a Core Team that would coordinate the Teams that would support our multi-year initiative, we would design and own the core Customer Experience and use this to build alignment across all the other teams and organisations we engaged.
Because we were collaborating with a global team for the benefit of a global audience, we made great efforts to describe the leanest experience we could think of, all using the simplest language possible to limit confusion.
Key Benefits
The benefits of this Human-Centred Operating Model were threefold.
Lean User Experience
By focusing on just 1–3 journeys for each phase of the competition, we were able to focus everyone on the bare essentials of the customer experience.
This made the experience easier to prototype and test, which meant we got feedback from students earlier and faster and we could learn what was working and what wasn’t working.
This undoubtedly helped us avoid scope creep and waste from adding features people didn’t need.
Getting things “done” was easier
By focusing on customer journeys and behaviours, it set a standard around validating whether work was “done” by using the technique known as behaviour-driven testing as a measure of acceptance of a customer journey.
If we could demonstrate that a range of students testing the experience could complete an activity and achieve their goal, we knew the experience met expectations.
Almost all other risks could be assessed below the experience later through further and more specialised tests that might apply to say just the Digital team or the Science Experiment team.
Everyone could understand this concept of testing the customer experience, which meant the plain and simple language we used to describe customer journeys provided a universal way to validate the completion of a feature.
Measuring progress was simple
Finally, by focusing on the customer and working backwards, we created an abstraction layer from all the complexity behind the experience that allowed us to track the progress of the many, many sub-initiatives and provide help when blockers to progress were raised by our partners.
We could measure by activity completion per journey or even feature completion if we wanted.
To give you an idea of some of the moving parts behind the scenes, we had to coordinate and unblock major issues such as –
- We hadn’t estimated the volume of the submission volumes correctly and whilst the technology could cope we had to very rapidly scale the human vetting element of it. This meant engaging 1000s of extra translators and qualified scientists to vet submissions alongside coordinating 60 of the world’s most famous space scientists and astronauts who acted as judges, including Neil Tye and Steven Hawking.
- We couldn’t know what kind of science experiments we would need to send into space until quite late in the competition, so we needed a flexible plan that would allow us to contain an experiment safely in specialist equipment that would be launched up to the International space station. This required extensive collaboration with NASA, ESA, JAXA and ROSCOSMOS and multiple calls with astronauts in space via Houston Mission Control.
- We had to work with live animals in space for the live stream and work out how we would get astronauts to get some jumping spiders to “space walk” whilst live-streaming an hour-long winner’s reveal show from the International Space Station with Bill Nye the Science Guy in a studio on Earth (Note that the spiders made it back to Earth).
In the end, the initiative was a huge success story. YouTube achieved record live stream and content views. Sponsors and partners gained enormous value from their involvement and students around the globe got to enjoy the wonders of zero-G flights, microgravity and space.
To date, this Human-centered approach of focusing on Key Customer Journeys and working backwards from them is one of the most successful foundations for Operating Models I’ve used in terms of its ability to align people across complex, multi-organisation initiatives.
It’s an approach I’ve successfully applied many times since to deliver and operate everything from Global Campaigns, to complex sets of Products & Services.
The beauty of it for me is that it is simple enough for everyone to understand, and it it scales well from small companies and teams to massive multi-level organisations.
So next time you’re setting out on an ambitious endeavour, don’t forget to start with your customer and work backwards to find better ways to operate and serve their needs.
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