From transactional services to transformational ecosystems: The Thoughtworks approach

Focusing on a service’s adoption in isolation is a risky, short-sighted strategy. The true success of any product or service is determined by the health of its entire ecosystem, not just its features. We’ve developed a framework to help you build products with the wider ecosystem in mind.

Many organizations make a critical mistake: they narrowly focus on perfecting their own product or service, believing superior features and a polished user experience alone will ensure adoption and market success. Teams obsess over optimizing their "offering" in isolation — they measure individual metrics, build sleek interfaces and invest in the latest technology assuming that a great product automatically wins.

This approach is outdated. 

Genuine adoption and growth are driven just as much by external forces — such as integrations, network effects and interdependencies — as by the product's standalone quality. Scaling isn’t about building the best offering; it’s about building the most connected, valuable and resilient part of the ecosystem.

Many organizations make a critical mistake: they narrowly focus on perfecting their own product or service, believing superior features and a polished user experience alone will ensure adoption and market success. Teams obsess over optimizing their "offering" in isolation — they measure individual metrics, build sleek interfaces and invest in the latest technology assuming that a great product automatically wins.

This approach is outdated. In today’s interconnected landscape, adoption doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Success increasingly relies on how well your offering fits and thrives within a broader ecosystem of partners, platforms and external dependencies. Genuine adoption and growth are driven just as much by external forces — such as integrations, network effects and interdependencies — as by the product's standalone quality. Scaling isn’t about building the best offering; it’s about building the most connected, valuable and resilient part of the ecosystem.

Service design for ecosystems

Tackling such a challenge needs to begin by trying to answer a number of key questions:

• How can we move beyond a siloed, service-centric view of innovation to a holistic, ecosystem-centric approach?

• How can we proactively design for success by understanding and influencing the broader context in which our offering operates? 

• How do we shift our focus from measuring short-term, individual gains to cultivating long-term, collective value that ensures our offering's longevity and impact? 

   

Answering these strategic questions requires a specific discipline: service design. If an ecosystem is the new competitive landscape, service design is the map and compass needed to navigate it successfully. It is the crucial bridge between a great offering and a great end-to-end experience.

Specifically, service design for ecosystems involves:

• Mapping the full journey: Visualizing every touchpoint and handover between partners from the customer's perspective.

• Identifying friction: Pinpointing the "weak links" where handovers are clumsy, slow or prone to failure.

• Orchestrating the backstage: Aligning the processes and technologies of different partners to make the behind-the-scenes complexity invisible to the end-user.

By adopting a service design mindset, organizations can shift from merely perfecting their own offering to architecting the seamless, frictionless experience that customers now demand.

Getting to grips with the existing ecosystem

The first step in doing all this is, of course, understanding the ecosystem as it currently exists. This isn’t easy: an ecosystem is a complex web of interdependent participants — including users, businesses, infrastructure providers, regulators and more — so unpicking them requires greater attentiveness than trying to understand a more rudimentary product/consumer relationship. Ultimately, though, an ecosystem is one where collective interactions creates value for each of the participants.

Why a holistic view is critical

It's important to realise that not all links in an ecosystem have the same level of rigor and robustness. In a truly interconnected ecosystem, a customer's experience is only as strong as its weakest link. A single point of failure, no matter how distant or seemingly insignificant, can instantly destroy the customer's perceived value. A brilliant, seamless offering can be completely derailed by a single external failure. Consider the example of booking a ride with your favorite mobility app. To deliver a seamless experience, several external factors must align:

• Reliable mobile network connectivity is crucial — without it, the app may fail at the very first step, preventing you from booking a ride.

• If there are outstanding payments from a previous ride and the payment gateway is down, you won’t be able to proceed with your next booking.

• If the app is intended for global use but doesn’t support adding local payment methods (like a prepaid card) in another country, you’re left unable to pay in the required currency.

   

Any one of these issues can instantly derail the entire user experience, revealing just how much the journey depends on multiple services working perfectly together. When things go wrong, customers rarely blame the external providers — they hold your brand responsible for the overall failure, which can leave a lasting negative impression. Consider a few other scenarios below.

• Financial offerings: A user with a beautifully designed UPI payment app attempts to pay a merchant. The transaction fails not because of the app's code, but due to an unreliable mobile data connection. The user doesn't blame the telecom provider; they blame the entire UPI experience and may lose trust in the digital payment system as a whole.

• Government offerings: A new, user-friendly digital tax portal is launched to streamline filings. However, its adoption fails because the underlying national digital ID system it relies on is slow and prone to outages. The citizen's frustration with the ID system erodes their trust in the entire digital government initiative, not just the tax portal.

• Retail: A customer uses a cutting-edge mobile commerce app to order a product with a promise of next-day delivery. The app experience is flawless, but the third-party logistics partner delivers the package two days late. The customer blames the retailer, leading to brand damage and churn, even though the issue was with an external partner.

This cascading impact demonstrates the fragility of interconnected systems and the urgent need to design for resilience at an ecosystem level, not just a product level.

Modeling an ecosystem: The ecosystem persona framework

To design for ecosystem success, you must first understand the ecosystem as a living, breathing entity. We developed the ecosystem persona framework to help leaders move beyond simple user personas to a strategic, ecosystem-level view. The accompanying infographic visually represents this persona, its internal tensions and the external roles it plays.

• Step 1: Map the ecosystem landscape. Go beyond a simple user journey map. Create a comprehensive map that identifies all participants, their roles and the value flows between them.

• Step 2: Understand the ecosystem persona's tensions. Analyze the strategic challenges of the ecosystem using our seven  key traits and their inherent tensions. A new offering must understand and help navigate these tensions to succeed. For example, will your offering help the ecosystem balance the urge for connection versus focus or the need for growth versus fairness?

The human persona of the ecosystem

• Step 3: Identify the ecosystem actor archetypes. Classify the participants in your map using our 14 archetypes, such as The Orchestrator, The Lifeline or The Challenger. This helps you understand their primary function and motivation and how your offering can create value for them.

• Step 4: Validate ideas by simulating the impact. Use the map and persona to simulate how a new offering will impact the ecosystem's tensions and actors. This allows you to capture collective intelligence and predict the likelihood of success before committing resources.

• Step 5: Aligning collective and  individual success. The final step is to ensure that your offering's individual success metrics (e.g., adoption rate) are directly tied to the collective success of the ecosystem. This ensures your innovation contributes to the greater good, making its success more durable and sticky.  For example, the overall goal of Real Time Payments (such as UPI in India) is to reach 1 billion payment transactions per day. When new players launch payment apps, focusing solely on acquiring existing users from other apps (and simply increasing their own revenue share), it does not help grow the overall transaction volume, which is the core objective for the ecosystem. Both new app providers and the broader ecosystem benefit more when innovation attracts new users and expands the base of people making UPI transactions — bringing the ecosystem closer to the target of 1 billion daily payments

Apply the ecosystem evolution framework

The lifecycle of an offering within an ecosystem is not static. Our 'ecosystem evolution framework' helps you apply the right strategic lens based on your offering's maturity.

• Enter: When you are launching a new offering to the market, your focus should be on identifying an offering-market fit and the key roles within the ecosystem. This phase is about limited, time-boxed spends to formulate your entry strategy and end-customer discovery.

• Expand: Once you have a foothold, the goal shifts to improving the offering with a focus on delivering scale and increasing the participants' share of value. You need to identify bottlenecks and address the weakest-link challenge by re-looking at your ecosystem KPIs.

• Enhance: In this mature stage, the focus is on growing the entire ecosystem pie. You should improve the reach and availability of the ecosystem, ensuring ecosystem-level performance is maintained while the focus shifts to becoming a much larger ecosystem. This is where you step into newer ecosystem participant roles as the overall ecosystem grows and expands into other ecosystems.

 How Thoughtworks can help

A bar of gold catching the sun in a barren desert is as worthy as the stone next to it. This is the fate of many brilliant products. They are objects of immense potential value, yet they fail because they are launched into the wrong environment — an ecosystem that cannot support them, trade them or even recognize their worth.

At Thoughtworks, our unique value proposition is our specialization in ensuring your "bar of gold" never suffers this fate. We don't just help you build and polish the product; we help you transform the desert into a marketplace.

We see a client's offering not in isolation, but as the potential center of a thriving economy. Taking an ecosystem-first approach, we use proven frameworks and co-creation techniques to help you map the entire terrain, identify the "missing roads and buyers" (the weak links), redefine your value proposition so it resonates and build the resilient, collaborative services that form a vibrant community around your offering.

The Thoughtworks difference is this: We enable our clients to become the architects of their own success. We help you shift from a transactional mindset of simply having the gold, to a transformational one of building the economy where it becomes the standard of value. We partner with you to build offerings that don't just exist like a relic in the sand, but truly thrive as the currency of a powerful ecosystem.