Customer Engagement

Don’t Blame Conway or the Iceberg

Rick Kotermanski

Start by asking what the Customer wants 

Conway’s Law (which is not really a law, but an adage described in this Wikipedia entry) states that “organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”


In my previous blog post discussing the customer engagement iceberg, I talked about the tendency for companies to expose internal organization structures and IT system silos to customers. This is an "inside out" approach that frustrates (or loses) prospects and customers. In this post, I discuss thinking differently about the typical way that companies approach solving customer engagement problems and dispelling the acceptance of Conway’s Law as the basis for the approach. Yes - I’m mixing metaphors.At the risk of stating the obvious we need to do more "Outside In" thinking - which is putting the customer at the center and designing and building experience from their point of view versus taking a purely technology-led approach. Outside-in thinking applies across all parts of the relationship (attract, sell, service), across products and services, and across the channels through which they are delivered. We can then incrementally integrate and modernize the systems behind the experience as needed (and better prioritize our investments)!

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Is Conway really to blame?
You might ask “Why do customers have to deal with internal structures and what can I do to improve their engagement”? According to a ThoughtWorks blog post, one cause is Conway's Law and their proposed solution is to implement systems using a microservices architecture to allow flexibility between the silos. I think that jumping to a technical solution is short sighted.

Jason Bloomberg discusses the topic from a slightly less technical point of view in two separate Intellyx blog posts relating Conway's Law to Devops and Agility. He suggests that organizational flexibility and adoption of devops practices and technologies are the answers. I agree with many of his points, especially about organizations and agility. I also agree that Conway's Law is a big factor, But, I disagree that technology and process are the only fixes.

The elephant in the room is a common understanding of the customer’s needs. We as technologists often start with solutions looking for problems. We tend to shy away from confronting the real user/customer needs. Instead we back into our comfort zones and siloed perspectives. Many problems require solutions that go beyond technology. Let’s go further: I think that results of Conway’s Law are being used as an excuse for poor customer engagement.

Companies are moving forward. More are creating executive positions like Chief Customer Officer and other variants with responsibility for all customer interactions. This is a start toward thinking more holistically about the customer. But it is just a start.

What has changed?
Much of the modern challenge is driven by the recent huge shift in power away from companies and into the hands of customers (literally, when those hands hold mobile devices.) We’ve historically organized teams around technologies, past and present processes and then sent them to solve the problems du jour with their individual hammers. The teams develop political and tribal tendencies and ultimately the customer experience becomes brittle, failing to keep up with ever-escalating demands.

To give a real-world example, a client approached us asking us to work with them on a mobile customer-facing application. As our Design team came to understand their requirements, it became clear that a product vendor and IT were pushing to implement a technology vs. getting to the real needs. The client paused and worked with us to assess the true customer needs through a combination of customer studies, interviews, internal workshops and brainstorming sessions across multiple internal departments (mostly outside of IT.)

The combined teams learned that a much more valuable and immediate need was around improving the customers’ in-store experience - to greatly enhance the capabilities of the already highly used kiosks. Mobile was identified as an eventual, not a current, need.

The resulting roadmap was based on an implementation plan that had immediate value in the store at kiosks while our architecture allowed for future extensions to include mobile and other channels. We were able to start sooner and provide value while setting the stage for expansion to multiple touchpoints and channels.

Three steps to improve your customers' engagement in the face of Conway’s Law?
There are three steps to ponder as you take on new initiatives to improve your customers’ engagement.

1. Disrupt your organization's typical way of thinking about solving customer problems. Instead, start using techniques that help your organization empathize with customers throughout all of their interactions with your company without considering the siloes. Take advantage of user studies, contextual inquiry, mental models, JOC and participatory design to learn what your customers want your software to do. This may result in some noise, but the approach is more valuable than leading with what you want them to want. Use this customer perspective alongside your corporate strategy and values to set the vision.

2. Work with interdisciplinary teams (business and technology) to simultaneously design functions, interactions and the technical architecture. You will save time and resources, have better project outcomes and happier customers this way instead of working in silos.

3. Establish an Integration architecture and implementation strategy around managing customer data that supports agility. Easily said, harder to do. Start by thinking about integration as a first class aspect of your design and not an afterthought. Microservices combined with Cloud and Devops capabilities can help you move faster.

Our most precious resource is time. It is important to use it efficiently and to make sure that we are solving the right customer engagement problems before competitors gain the upper hand. Agile, microservices, devops and customer engagement platforms and products of various sorts are necessary to success, but not sufficient to creating a great customer engagement strategy. The three steps above will set you on the right track.

Rick Kotermanski
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chief Strategy Officer