Day in the life of an experience owner

Find out what it’s like to work as an experience owner in the public service in Australia.

Tom, from a local government agency, shares a day in the life as an experience owner.

My first role in government was to look after an Information Technology (IT) support team, as I had a background in IT. My team were given carriage of a brand-new content management system and were given some training on that system. I was able to leverage some of my skills from university and talk to people from the industry to build up expertise. I gradually worked my way into the product and service design spaces and completed a degree in digital media to give myself those extra design, soft and technical skills to work in this domain. 

Currently, I’m the director of design and experience, where I look at government experience. My team completes a lot of pre-discovery work for business lines. That pre-discovery work involves gathering evidence to understand what the users may need. We share our ideas with stakeholders on how the services will look and operate and test the products with the users.

We then move from pre-discovery stage to project budget-bidding. We typically go through the budget-bidding process before moving forward. Moving into discovery, it’s essential to collaborate with people and not build designs in isolation.

If I had to go and design a system myself with users, I could make the perfect system that meets their needs. But there are a range of aspects that we need to consider, for example, IT and legislation. That’s why we work in an MDT (multidisciplinary team) where we have policy people and technologists across the detail and work together towards a common goal.  

I enjoy working with people and seeing that the products and services I’m helping to deliver are benefiting communities because we've tailored products to user needs. It gives me a buzz to improve people’s lives and inspires me to do more.  

I also enjoy being able to influence senior stakeholders. It’s important to be able to explain the complexities of the process through words and visual representations. You can’t just solve the problems with a simple swing of a brush because the changes you make here, will impact another aspect of the process.  

I am a part of national and international interaction, accessibility, and design communities. Some of my roles have allowed me to work with the UK, Canadian and US governments in the design space, which has given me access to some of their forums, training materials and learning programs.

I’ve been an SME (subject matter expert) that they’ve also been able to leverage.  

Providing guidance and subject matter expertise

I have a dynamic team working across multiple projects touching on city services, health and education to name a few. We often work collaboratively with other design teams across government. Part of my role is to mentor and coach members so they can leverage processes to onboard design practices. Together we go out and complete workshops to build journey maps and service blueprints. I am available to all staff to bounce ideas off and work through problems. 

I’m also an SME representing all users, internal and external. This involves shaping conversations with user-based evidence to inform project directions and providing guidance to senior staff around pain points and solutions. 

Creating order out of chaos

I don’t think there’s one common pathway into experience ownership. I think the discipline would suit individuals who like to interact with people respectfully and ask those probing questions. If you enjoy organising and creating order out of chaos, then this may be the career for you.

All experiences are like a coin. There are two sides to it: a public side and a private side, and you need to serve both.  

The public side is what we refer to as the CX (customer experience). We want the customer to be able to follow a process seamlessly to get the desired result. The service should be timely and accessible and work within the customer’s technological constraints to meet their specialist needs. 

We also want to ensure that the experience is consistent across communities. So, if one person has applied to register a dog or cat, and another does the same, are they getting the same outcomes? Is it in the same time frame? Is this reflective of what people want? 

We also have to look more broadly into the employee space. We want staff to be given the right tools to make the right judgement calls to support the applications. Our ICT department has computer systems that run these services for us. When do they get time to do what they need to do? When do you take these systems down overnight to do patching and how does that impact the users? We look at our business processes and what policy requirements need to be addressed to guide service delivery. How does what policymakers do impact our service offering? As part of design, do we need to reinterpret the policy? We need to think very broadly so, it’s not just a good experience for our end-users, but it’s a good experience for everybody involved.  

While I did make a coin analogy, there is also a third aspect. Human-centred design is trying to level up to what is now called humanity-centred or life-centred design. Humanity-centred design is not necessarily looking at the experience of the individual. It’s also looking at the impact of the service more generally. For example, if I’m building a service, am I causing environmental damage? Am I polluting more as a result, or am I reducing our carbon footprint? Those aspects are now becoming part of the process.  

All views expressed are personal views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the view of the department or agency. 

Interested in becoming an experience owner? 

Learn more about the skills, and how to upskill to do similar roles like an ee if your skills can be used and how to upskill to be an experience owner.