Operations

Strategy defines what the organisation stands for. Audiences define what the organisation commits to delivering. Operations is where both meet reality.

This is the dimension that most experience strategies underinvest in, and the reason most of them fail. It is relatively straightforward to articulate compelling principles and define ambitious audience experiences. The hard work is building the organisational capability to deliver them: consistently, at scale, across every function, every team, and every interaction, day after day.

The Operations dimension of XEF addresses this challenge directly. It identifies whether the organisation can deliver what it has committed to, and if not, what needs to change in order for it to do so. That means examining the operating model: the structure, people, process, and technology through which the organisation translates its strategic intent into real-world outcomes.

The gap between strategic intent and operational delivery is one of the most significant and most persistent sources of underperformance. Research by Mankins and Steele found that companies on average deliver only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise. Organisations that deliberately orient their operating model around a defined experience standard give every structural, people, process, and technology decision a clear shared purpose rather than a departmental convenience. This directly addresses what Sull, Homkes and Sull found in a survey of 7,600 managers across 262 companies across 30 industries. The main cause of the gap is not weak alignment up and down the hierarchy, which in most organisations is sound, but weak coordination across departments, where local priorities quietly override the shared goal.

The scale of this challenge varies enormously from one organisation to the next. For smaller, less complex organisations, where culture, leadership behaviour, and operational practice are already broadly coherent and values-driven, the shift may be relatively straightforward. The principles will not be far from how people already behave, the processes will not be dramatically misaligned with the intended experiences, and the work is largely making explicit and consistent what already works in practice.

For larger, more complex organisations, with embedded functional silos, legacy processes, and real distance between stated values and daily reality, the shift is a major undertaking. It may require formal change programmes, operating model redesign, technology investment, and sustained leadership commitment over several years. Here the work is reconstruction, and it warrants the same rigour and governance as any other major transformation.

Why the operating model matters for experience

An operating model is the architecture of how an organisation works. It describes how capability is organised, how decisions are made, how work flows across functions, and how resources are deployed to achieve strategic objectives. It is the system through which strategy becomes delivery.

For most organisations, the operating model was designed around functional efficiency, financial control, and the management of specific products or services, often incrementally over many years. The result is usually an architecture optimised for internal logic rather than external impact. Functions operate relatively independently, each managing their own processes, their own data, and their own definition of what good looks like, with limited visibility into how their decisions affect the experience of audiences across the system as a whole.

This is the structural source of the fragmentation that XEF is designed to address. When the operating model is not aligned around a common experience standard, fragmentation is an inevitable product of the architecture. Fixing it requires a deliberate redesign of how the organisation is structured and how it works. That redesign places experience at the centre of every significant operational decision.

McKinsey's Business Value of Design study rated 300 companies on how deeply design was embedded in the way they worked, measured through analytical leadership, cross-functional talent, continuous iteration, and user experience. Those in the top quartile grew revenue and total returns to shareholders at close to twice the rate of their industry peers over five years, 32 and 56 percentage points higher respectively. McKinsey describes this as a correlation, and what it measured was design capability rather than an experience-led operating model. What makes it relevant here is what the top performers had in common. Design sat with leadership and ran across functions, rather than being held inside one team, and McKinsey found it took years of leadership commitment to establish. Organisations that build their operating model around experience tend to be more aligned and more responsive than those that treat experience as an overlay on an existing operational structure. 

Within XEF, the operating model ensures that every structural, people, process, and technology decision has a clear purpose, anchored to the experience principles and oriented towards the audience experiences defined in the preceding dimension.

The Operations dimension:

• Is anchored to strategy: Changes to the operating model are evaluated against experience principles and the brand promise, ensuring operational decisions serve strategic intent rather than departmental convenience or short-term efficiency. 
• Spans the audience experience spectrum: The operating model is designed to deliver experiences across every audience, ensuring internal capability reflects the full scope of the organisation's experience commitments. 
• Creates alignment: When structure, people, process, and technology are all oriented around the same experience principles, every function operates from a shared understanding of what good looks like, reducing friction, duplication, and inconsistency that fragmentation produces. 
• Is continuously informed by measurement: Because performance data sits within the same framework, operational decisions are shaped by real evidence rather than assumption, closing the gap between intended and actual experience faster and more precisely.

The Operations dimension draws on a range of tools including journey mapping, service blueprinting, operating model design, capability assessment, and change management frameworks to translate the intended experience into operational reality. It is also where the operational experience disciplines (user experience, product experience, sales experience, workplace experience, service experience, and others) do their work, delivering the defined audience experiences. The goal is not a single transformation programme, but a sustained shift in how the organisation is structured and how it works, embedding experience as a permanent operating standard rather than a periodic initiative.

The four components of the operating model

Within XEF, the operating model is examined and designed across four components: structure, people, process, and technology. Each of the four either delivers the intended experience or prevents it. An organisation that changes one while leaving the others aligned to something else will find the experience follows the three it did not change.

These four components have a long lineage in organisational design. XEF follows the same logic as Leavitt's Diamond, which models an organisation as four interdependent components: structure, people, task, and technology, and draws on the broader tradition that Galbraith's Star Model and McKinsey's 7-S Framework established.

Those frameworks separate the organisation into more elements, five for Galbraith, seven for 7-S, but the additional ones are either captured within XEF's four or handled elsewhere in the framework. Systems and tasks map to process; staff, skills and rewards sit within people; strategy and shared values are set in the Strategy dimension through the experience principles; and style, meaning leadership behaviour, is a condition for the framework to operate rather than a component to design, and is addressed in Chapter 8. What remains is the minimum set that captures the operational reality an organisation designs against, without dividing the work into more categories than a leadership team can effectively manage.

Operating model revision cannot be delegated to a working group, outsourced to a consulting team, or run from within a single function, because the decisions it produces are consequential and cross-functional. 

• Redesigning structure means deciding authority, accountability, and ownership across every leader. 
• Redesigning people systems means changing hiring, performance management, and rewards for every employee. 
• Redesigning processes means dismantling ways of working that functions have built and protected over years. 
• Directing technology investment against an experience standard rather than a capability catalogue means overriding procurement and vendor relationships that are deeply embedded in practice.

None of these decisions can be made from below. They require the authority to resolve cross-functional tensions, the mandate to hold every function to the same standard, and the credibility to sustain the change through the resistance it will meet. So the precondition for the work in this chapter is a leadership team committed to the change and aligned on the standard. How that leadership is established, governed, and held to account is the subject of Chapter 8. The four components that follow describe what needs to change and why.

Structure

Organisational structure determines where decision-making authority sits, how functions relate to each other, and who has visibility across the system as a whole. In most organisations, structure is a primary source of experience fragmentation, because the boundaries between functions are also the boundaries between audience experiences.

An experience-led operating model requires clear answers to three structural imperatives, each of which addresses a specific source of fragmentation:

• Ownership. Experience owned within a single function reaches only as far as that function's remit. Even a dedicated customer-experience function, often sitting under a Chief Customer or Chief Revenue Officer, owns just one audience's experience. HR owns the employee's, operations owns process efficiency. No single owner reaches an experience that spans every audience at once.
• Connection. The functions responsible for delivering audience experience should be formally connected, working from the same experience principles rather than their own interpretations of them. The experience an audience receives is rarely the product of a single function, and informal collaboration alone cannot produce a cohesive experience when each function operates to its own standards.
• Decision-making. If a decision would change what an audience experiences, expects, or believes about the organisation, it warrants evaluation against the principles before it is made. The most consequential experience failures are usually the result of decisions made without the right people in the room, without the right standard being applied, and without the experiential consequences being considered.

Together, these three imperatives point towards a single structural outcome: a formal experience governance function. It should have the authority to set and enforce the experience standard across every function, the cross-functional representation needed to ensure every audience perspective is considered, and a connection to the most consequential decisions the organisation makes. The form that function takes will vary by organisational size and complexity. The function it must perform does not. How that governance is established, and how it is held to account at executive and board level, is set out in Chapter 8.

People

The people component addresses a fundamental question in experience strategy. Do the people in the organisation have the capability, the understanding, and the motivation to deliver the intended experience, consistently, in every interaction, regardless of whether anyone is watching?

Each component of this question requires a different organisational response:

• Capability. The skills, knowledge, and tools people need to deliver the experience the principles describe. Capability gaps in experience delivery are not always about technical skills. They are also about the contextual capabilities that determine how people behave in the moments that matter most: empathy, judgement, communication, and the ability to apply a principle to an unfamiliar situation.
• Understanding. Whether people know what the experience principles mean in the context of their specific role, and why their contribution to the experience matters. This is the connection that most organisations fail to make explicitly: between the strategic standard articulated at the top of the organisation and the daily decisions made by individuals at every level.
• Motivation. Whether the organisation’s people systems (hiring criteria, performance management standards, recognition and reward structures, and leadership behaviours) are aligned with the experience principles in a way that makes living by them the natural, default way of working rather than an additional demand competing with existing priorities.

The alignment test for the people component is direct. If an employee delivers an outstanding experience for every audience but falls short on a financial target, what does the organisation reward? If a leader achieves commercial results through behaviours that contradict the principles, what does the organisation do? The answers reveal more about the organisation’s commitment to its principles than anything written in a strategy document.

Process

If structure is where experience fragmentation originates, process is where audiences encounter it: in the systems and procedures that make delivering the intended experience unnecessarily difficult, or that actively work against it. These are not touchpoints anyone designed. They are the ordinary machinery of how work gets done, and they produce a large share of what audiences actually encounter.

Every organisation has processes designed for internal use without consideration of their effect on external or internal audiences. Approval processes that slow response times to a level that contradicts a principle of simplicity. Procurement processes that impose burdens on partners that contradict a principle of mutual respect. Communication processes that produce jargon-laden correspondence that contradicts a principle of clarity. These are the inevitable product of processes designed to serve the organisation rather than its audiences, and they are among the most significant sources of the experience gap.

Redesigning processes for experience is a fundamental reorientation of process design around the audience. It asks not “How can we make this process more efficient?” but “How can we make this process more consistent with the experience we have committed to delivering?”. The output is a different process, built from a different starting point and judged against a different standard, rather than a leaner version of the one that exists.

This is often painstaking work, and it frequently encounters resistance from the functions that own the processes being examined, particularly when the redesign requires those functions to accept a reduction in their own operational convenience in service of a better audience experience. But it is one of the most valuable changes an organisation can make in how it delivers experience, because process is the mechanism through which intentions become interactions, and interactions become impressions. Impressions, accumulated over time across every audience relationship, are what determine whether the organisation is living its principles or merely describing them.

Legal and compliance review is one of the most consequential processes any audience-facing decision passes through, which makes it a clear test of whether process enables or obstructs experience. Where experience principles and regulatory constraints conflict, the regulatory constraints win. But the larger space by far is the one where the two do not conflict, and how the review process behaves inside that space often determines whether experience improvements happen. In a function-led organisation, legal review tends to default to pushing back on experience initiatives. In an experience-led organisation, that same review becomes the process through which the organisation finds a path to deliver the principles within the regulatory environment it operates in. The experience principles are the standard the legal function applies its judgement against, the same way every other function does.

Technology

Technology now mediates a growing share of the interactions between organisations and their audiences, and a growing share of the experience gaps organisations struggle to close. The problem is rarely a shortage of technology. For most organisations it is the opposite, they have too much. It is deployed in a fragmented way, with little connection between the systems that hold audiences data, and limited alignment between technology investment and the experience principles those investments are meant to deliver. This is one reason technology spending so often fails to move the experience. In most cases the technology is capable enough, it just lacks a standard directing it.

An experience-led approach to technology starts with the experience standard rather than the technology. The first question is what the experience standard requires, and what technology is needed to deliver it. Starting from the standard produces a different set of requirements, oriented around the continuity of each audience relationship, the quality of the interaction at every touchpoint, and the intelligent use of data to anticipate need and improve the experience over time.

Data is where this component does its most important work. Most organisations hold substantial data about their customers, reasonable data about their employees, and little or no structured data about their partners, influencers, and societal relationships. The data they do hold tends to sit in separate systems built for separate functions, so no part of the organisation sees the whole of any single relationship, let alone the picture across all of them. Building a connected data architecture that spans the full range of audience relationships, and produces a coherent, close to real-time view of experience performance across every one of them, is among the most valuable and most transformative investments an operating model redesign can make.

The value of that connected view is well established. McKinsey's research on personalisation found that faster-growing companies drive 40% more of their revenue from personalisation than their slower-growing counterparts, that personalisation typically lifts revenue by 5 to 15%, and that 71% of consumers now expect personalised interactions while 76% are frustrated when they do not receive them. Personalisation at that level depends entirely on connected data, because an organisation can only anticipate, tailor, and improve an experience if it can see the relationship whole. Organisations that build this capability operate with an advantage that those managing fragmented, function-level data cannot easily replicate.

The same capability raises the stakes on how data is handled. The more an organisation knows about its audiences, and the more it uses that knowledge to shape their experience, the more its treatment of their data becomes part of the experience itself. Consumers expect personalisation, and they also expect their data to be used responsibly, particularly as regulators and the wider public pay closer attention to privacy and consent. In an experience-led operating model, the data architecture is governed by the same experience principles as everything else, so that the pursuit of a more connected experience builds trust rather than quietly spending it.

Artificial intelligence sits inside this component as both a force the organisation is responding to and a set of capabilities it can deploy deliberately. Personalisation at scale, predictive service, content tailored to individual context, and the automation of routine operational work are all now possible at a cost and quality that were unavailable a decade ago. What matters for the operating model is that the same capability amplifies whichever way the model points it. Deployed against a defined experience standard, governed by the principles and evaluated by the measurement architecture, AI produces improvements that compound. Deployed without those connections, it delivers efficiency gains that can erode the relationships the organisation depends on, sometimes faster than the operating model can detect.

Klarna, discussed in the introduction, illustrates the second pattern. The AI capability and savings were real, but customer satisfaction fell on the complex, high-stakes interactions the system handled poorly, and the company began rebuilding its human support. The lesson is about deployment, not the technology: AI introduced without the structural connections to principles, audience commitments, and measurement produces consequences the operating model cannot see in time. An experience-led organisation therefore holds AI to the same standard as every other operational decision, asking not only what a capability enables and saves, but what it commits the organisation to in the relationships it is responsible for.

The operational experience disciplines

Chapter 2 introduced a set of disciplines that carry the word "experience" in their names but do not describe an audience. User experience, product experience, service experience, digital experience, sales experience, workplace experience, learning experience, physical experience, and developer experience are operational experience disciplines. Each designs a particular kind of interaction, system, or environment. And each cuts across audiences rather than serving a single one, because the same discipline shapes a different audience's experience depending on who is interacting with what the organisation has built.

These disciplines are where the four components of the operating model meet the audience. They are the practices through which structure, people, process, and technology become what the audience actually experiences, and most of them sit across more than one component at once. Service and sales experience are largely matters of process, digital and developer experience are bound up with technology, workplace and learning experience run through people and place. Any single audience experience is produced by several of them working together. A customer experience, for instance, is delivered through the user experience of the app, the product experience of the thing being consumed, the sales experience of the purchase, and the service experience of the support that follows.

In most organisations these disciplines operate as separate crafts, each with its own team, its own tools, and its own standard, and rarely connected to one another or to a shared definition of what good looks like. That is the same fragmentation the structure and process components described, appearing now at the level of the disciplines themselves. The contribution XEF makes is to give them a common reference point. Each discipline works to the same experience principles, against the same audience definitions, and is evaluated by the same measurement architecture, so that the experiences they each produce add up to a coherent whole rather than a set of locally optimised parts.

Operations in the context of XEF

The Operations dimension is continuously shaped by the other three dimensions of XEF. The relationship with Measurement deserves particular emphasis, because the most common failure mode in experience strategy is the disconnection between the two. Data is collected and reported, but the insights never travel back into the operational decisions that could act on them. XEF treats this connection as a structural requirement, designed into the operating model from the outset rather than added later, so that when measurement surfaces a gap, the operating model is built to close it.

Sustaining this connection in the daily reality of organisational life, where operational decisions are made quickly, under pressure, and against competing priorities, requires two things. The first is governance: structural checkpoints at which experience implications are considered before significant decisions are finalised, and at which measurement insights are actively consulted rather than passively received. The second is leadership behaviour: senior leaders visibly applying the principles to real decisions in ways others can observe and follow.

The four components and the disciplines that run across them are what turn a defined experience into a delivered one. Structure decides who is accountable, people decides who is capable, process decides what happens by default, and technology decides what is possible at scale. When all four are anchored to the same experience principles, the organisation delivers its intended experience as a matter of routine rather than effort.