Your new digital product ticks every box. It does what people asked for, it passed testing, and it launched on time. So why are so few people using it?
That was the question David Cannon, Senior Director of ITIL® at PeopleCert, tackled in our latest webinar: Your digital products work. So why is nobody using them? His take: a great product isn’t enough. Quality still matters, of course, but adoption depends on the experience wrapped around it.
Below, we’ve rounded up David’s five biggest takeaways. There was plenty more in the session though, so if you want the full story, you can watch it on demand.
The host
🎤 David Cannon, Senior Director of ITIL, PeopleCert
1. A great digital product doesn’t guarantee a great experience
Good services rely on good products, but the quality of the product alone doesn’t determine the experience.
As David put it: “You can have the best products in the world, but if they are slow, if they’re not delivered well, if they’re not supported effectively by the team who manages those services, then the product gets a bad reputation.”
That means product and service teams can’t work in isolation. People use products within a wider service, so the two need to be understood together.
2. IT needs to cross the ‘great divide’
David has a name for the gap between IT teams and the people they serve: the ‘great divide’.
“The great divide is that chasm between the provider and the consumers, the people who create the products and services and the people who use the products and services.”
One example brought the problem to life. An IT team at a US hospital scheduled server maintenance for 2am on Sunday, believing it was a quiet period. For the emergency department, however, it was its busiest time of the week, leaving staff reliant on manual processes to admit and triage patients.
The lesson here is to understand how products and services are used in real life. Get to know your users and their journeys, and you can make decisions about design and delivery with a much clearer picture of how they’ll affect the people using them.
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3. Stop celebrating firefighting and start fixing the problem
There will always be times when things go wrong, and recovering a poor experience is important. David’s concern is what happens when organisations get so good at recovery that those efforts start to be celebrated as “magnificent feats of heroism”.
He described it as becoming “almost like a cult”, where attention shifts towards dealing with bad experiences after a product breaks or a service becomes unavailable, rather than addressing the failures themselves.
“We take money that could have been used to fix the problem, to create quality products, and we spend it on firefighting,” David added.
His recommendation is to measure the value of services when they’re operating normally, then compare that with the cost of the “heroic efforts” needed to restore them when they fail. He also stressed that design and support teams need to work together, rather than treating design and recovery as separate responsibilities.
👉 More from GEL: Why frameworks alone don’t guarantee adoption in ITSM
4. The ‘best’ service isn’t always the right service
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the best possible service is always something to strive for. And while aiming high is important, David’s point was that the level of service you deliver needs to be sustainable.
Imagine ordering a cheap burger at a fast-food chain and being served a £50 steak instead. You’d probably be delighted, albeit a little surprised. But when you return the following week and receive the burger you originally paid for, your expectations have already changed.
The same principle applies to extreme overdelivery in IT services. “Delivering the best level of service possible is never a good idea,” David said. “It’s only a good idea if you can sustain it.”
Underdelivery creates its own problems, though. David explained that when people receive products or services that don’t meet their needs, they can simply look elsewhere. He pointed to shadow IT and AI as examples, noting that people unhappy with what they receive from IT can increasingly source alternatives themselves.
His advice is to focus on delivering the right level of service: meet the expected level as a minimum, with slight overdelivery wherever it’s viable and sustainable.
5. Stop assuming what a good experience looks like
The final takeaway brings everything back to measurement. IT is usually good at defining metrics, but are we measuring the things that matter most to users?
“It doesn’t matter what you measure. When your service or product is delivered to the user, they have their own metrics. […] They will still define the way they understand quality or performance.”
So start with the people using the service. Talk to them about how they experience it and how your products and services fit into their day-to-day journeys, then use those insights to decide how you measure experience.
And keep checking back. Test whether your metrics reflect what users are really experiencing, and ask three questions of the data: is it representative, is it trustworthy, and is it coherent?
As David concluded: “The real differentiating factor as to whether your services and products are being used is how they are being experienced.”
👉 Read next: How to put the guiding principles of ITIL® (Version 5) into action
Continue the conversation: governing AI responsibly
AI is creating another challenge for IT teams: when AI makes a mistake inside your organisation, who is accountable? With 68% of employees already using AI without approval, the governance gap is already a very pressing issue.
Join our upcoming webinar with Roman Zhuravlev, Senior Architect at ITIL®, as he explores how to adopt AI confidently and responsibly, while managing risk and delivering business value.
📅 Date: Thursday 29 October
🕐 Time: 2.30pm (BST)
🎥 Can’t attend live? Register and we’ll send you the recording.
