Meet DA People #1 — Oğuz Kartal

At Dogma Alares, we discover the next generation consulting by revising strategy on the axis of design and experience as well as of artificial intelligence and digital technology. During this exploration, I recently had an interview with Oğuz Kartal, our partner at service design and customer experience.

Hello Oğuz, can you tell us about yourself a little? What did you study and what have you been working on so far?

Hi! Not completely relevant to what I am doing today yet I am a graduate of economics. Hence, my first job experience was in banking. I worked about 5 years at Yapı Kredi’s Digital Alternative Distribution Channels Department which was mainly centred around online and mobile banking applications. Of course, these were the times when mobile banking was solely about WAP; moreover, what we call digital today had just started to be articulated. After the military service, I moved to London. There, I have heard about the notion of user experience during the product management programs I attended in London School of Economics and it appealed me already then; however, Turkcell has become where I actually met the concept of service design. I managed a huge, 4-year-long transformation project as the product manager in Turkcell during which I had the chance to work with some of the biggest design agencies in the world. I was so intrigued by the work done that I skipped the client-vendor relationship at some point and started working with them as one of their own. This experience showed me that how much design impacts the product and its KPIs when properly applied, so I founded a similar organisation inside Turkcell. Gathering a team of designers, we began to work just as design studios. This is my story of getting into the design world; later, I also completed further coursework from Parsons School of Design, of course. After Turkcell, we met with IBM; I got the opportunity to found and shape the 34th of IBM’s worldwide design studios, IBM iX. Not only design and experience, we were providing end-to-end consulting services. Just before joining Dogma Alares, I have worked on a digital banking project abroad. Now, I have been here, at Dogma Alares for 6 months.

As far I understand, you have outlived the times when this field has just emerged in the world and not even been spoken of in Turkey. Nevertheless, today, I still have the feeling that there are (at least I have) difficulties in defining and drawing the line around the terms, service design and customer experience. From your standpoint, what is service design and customer experience? What should we understand when we hear these terms? What are being exactly pointed when these terms are used?

Let me try to put it simply. There are many products and services that we use in our everyday lives, or in our professional environment. Attached, there is the experience which they make us go through while we interact with them. Apple’s iPhone is a typical example, but we should not be narrowing down the concept to only digital. Examine a carefully designed airport, you will see available restrooms just where you leave the plane. The passport control points are located just where the passengers would expect, you never get tired or lost while looking for them. It is possible to increase the number of examples. In principle, we may define it as a collection of approaches for designing a service or a product from scratch by putting users to the centre or solving users’ problems while converting them into new opportunities by focusing on the experience. These approaches really avail many companies to gain advantage or create revolutionary work although they have no significant superiority to their competitors, neither in resources, capabilities nor in technology. Back to the iPhone case, if you remember the times when it first comes to the market, despite many predecessor phones with touch screens, Apple revolutionised the industry by focusing users’ pain points precisely and earned its place in the market today. This is accomplished by identifying and solving the actions that users try to complete, namely “jobs to be done” in our design jargon. When you start with this identification and then pass on to the infrastructure and implementation, you succeed. We call this approach design-oriented product development.

We observe that design-oriented development processes, designer perspectives and design principles are sometimes neglected, especially by large corporate and traditional organisations. How do you see the involvement of user experience and user journey concepts in business processes, products and services?

Good question. “Sometimes” in your question is a bit optimistic. It would not be an exaggeration if we say “always”. Unfortunately, studying on design and experience is perceived as luxury. We often hear sentences like “We will get to that after we launch”, “Do we have to draw all these wireframes?”, “What is there to study the UX?”. Another malpractice is designing services or products at the table, disregarding the user completely and going with own presumptions without any validation. Those habits are hard to drop and unfortunately this is still how it is done most of the time. Even at Turkcell, we encountered these kinds of situations in spite of being a quite user-centric company. Similarly, IBM, despite all the know-how and technology, experienced hardship in performing user-centric design hence the need for iX. Choosing the correct set and combination of hardware and software only while developing an app does not get you to success.

Hopefully, we have now convincing data and methods at hand for that revealing the concrete impact of design to the business results. We clearly see where companies eventually end up if they do not adopt design-oriented product development. We try to explain that to our clients by describing the effects of our previous projects and showing the user’s pain and fail points in their own products.

How did you get together with Dogma Alares? How were your thoughts before joining and how has your experience been since you joined?

Just after I returned to Turkey, I met with Erdal and Kıvanç. When I considered Dogma Alares’ 4-pillar vision bringing strategy, service design, digital technologies and artificial intelligence together and the extensive and integrated approach proposed to the clients, I thought that there is no real competitor in Turkey so we might have a huge opportunity. Therefore, I wanted to join the team and work together.

It has been 6 months; organising the processes, communicating to clients and delivering projects made hectic 6 months to be honest. When I look back, most of the projects involved service design. We work with other ‘pillars’ very well. For example, I had the opportunity to work closely with our technology partner Mete. Together, we developed and delivered a stand-alone digital product for a client in telecom sector. Simultaneously deciding on the technology stack and considering the scalability of the software architecture while we were thinking for the design and the experience made us deliver the product very efficiently and effectively. On the other side, Erdal and we worked on the operating model that would enable the client to manage the product successfully after we handed off to them. Working in such setup was truly wonderful because we created a project where we got involved and governed almost every aspect of it. Finally, we were able to deliver the product in such package that its design, experience, infrastructure, technology, strategy, organisational and operational models, even future backlogs and itinerary were ready. The feeling of accomplishing that gives me pleasure.

There is a growing team inside. For the sake of service design, how things are seen and done at Dogma Alares?

One of the most important things we have done since I joined is setting our target for service design. We try to serve in 360 degrees at Dogma Alares. Clients come us with questions about either how to realise an idea into a product or how to make an existing one better. Mere design is not a sufficient answer. Mere infrastructure or software implementation also does not suffice; they all must work together. There comes design thinking process, a process from knowing the users around the problem to identifying their needs, understanding the types of services, then prototyping and creating minimum viable product. We could only manage to follow this process with a team containing various capabilities. Even though all of us improves ourselves in our own areas, understanding and speaking at least the basics of the languages of other disciplines are needed for achieving the next-gen. Especially for the fresh graduates, which we recently hired many and doubled our team in size, I observe that this is very beneficial. We offer a space where they can look at their work at every aspect; hence, we provide a wider range of learning opportunities compared to any design agency. At projects, we create an environment where one can learn the foundations of strategy development from a management consultant, the logic of software design and development from a software developer, or what data science, artificial intelligence and analytics can do using available data from a machine learning engineer. We believe this environment would contribute them with important traits for their professional life.