EmpathyOps: Serving Customers By Serving Each Other

The DevOps community has been exploring the idea that DevOps is really bigger than dev and ops. If this is true (I think it is), then we need a different name. In my experience, telling designers or product managers that “DevOps is for you too” results in blank stares.

I briefly got excited about “DesignOps”. It seemed to capture the view of design and operations as a unified, end-to-end, collaborative feedback loop. Unfortunately the design systems folks stole it (just kidding!) for their own purposes, so I found myself back at square one.

As I realized in 2014, the essence of DevOps is empathy. Empathy also lies at the heart of design thinking. In fact, in the service economy, empathy drives everything. In order to serve customers well, we have to empathize with them. The emergence of jobs-to-be-done as an innovation framework reflects this understanding. It shifts our perspective from our realm (what we make) and into our customers’ realm (what they need help accomplishing).

DevOps’ most profound contribution is the recognition that quality service experiences depend on quality service relationships within organizations. We need to design for each other as part of designing for our customers. At every level of the organization, our job is no longer just to do what we do, whether that job is administering a database, or enforcing security practices, or maintaining a product roadmap. Instead, our job is to help each other create larger value, and by extension help our customers create larger value.

Empathy simultaneously drives customer benefit and serves as the glue that binds an organization together. Digital service emerges from design/operations loops that continuously turn empathy into action. Put another way, it’s empathy all the way down. What we really need is organizations that are design-infused, not just design-led.

Together, DevOps and design thinking offer a method for “operationalizing empathy”. This train of thought led me to the term “empathy operations”, aka “EmpathyOps”. I believe that EmpathyOps captures the nature of digital service, as well as the essence of what people mean when they say that “DevOps is bigger than dev and ops”.

EmpathyOps expresses the understanding that empathy and operations are both necessary but not sufficient. Every day we see public, embarrassing service failures that result from operational efficiency divorced from empathy. To make good on empathy, though, we need to infuse it into organizational behavior at every level so that it can flow through operations processes and actually make it to the customer. In other words, we need to operationalize empathy itself.