What is Service Portfolio Design?

Service Portfolio Design is two things. Although it certainly includes 'traditional' service design and service blueprinting, it's scope is much wider. And while the term 'Portfolio' does sound geeky, there is specific intent in using it. Service Portfolio Design asks the following two design questions:

• What services do we need to best meet customer need (i.e., the customer job to be done), customer experience expectations and convey our intended market differentiating brand experience?

• How might we design these individual services to work together to provide cross-sell, up-sell, and bundling opportunities that are genuinely useful to customers and that turn a net profit?

The term 'Portfolio' speaks to the fact that each service or product has a life cycle of its own, and these life cycles need to be managed collectively in order to ensure consistency and continuity of customer experience. We've all experienced the sense of disappointment and frustration when the cool new product we've discovered and come to depend on is suddenly 'withdrawn' or simply disappears without explanation.

I can remember a time when service blueprinting seemed such a radical shift from carefully engineered BPMN process models where the customer typically existed somewhere outside the swim-lanes and between the Start and End events. Now service design, journey maps and service blueprints just seem such an obvious way to describe customer-centric interactions, and if you look closely you can still the underlying process flow structure.

One design technique that helps connect the design of individual services with the set of services as a whole is ‘customer speed dating’ or ‘design expo’ in which each individual design squad showcases their service to small groups of potential customers who rotate across service showcases providing feedback as they go. This process means design squads get to present and receive feedback multiple times on their service design, while customers get to see the full scope of what is potentially on offer. The session then concludes with an activity where customers and design squads evaluate how the service designs work as a whole.

A topic occasionally neglected in the design of services is that of financial viability. Service Portfolio Design ideally needs to be conducted in the context of a wider Business Sustainability design initiative. Managing services as a portfolio allows that some services may deliberately make a loss as long as this ‘cost’ is compensated for by income from other services in the portfolio. Additionally, business sustainability is a much bigger topic than financial viability as it also encompasses environmental and social sustainability – both of which also have a bearing on brand and services. We’ll address those issues and others in another post.