Backstage Matters: Designing the Regulatory Machinery Behind a Seamless Service

CHALLENGE

Business and regulatory processes (backstage of service experiences) can sometimes feel disconnected or retrofitted to the service

Government services can easily fall apart behind the curtain. Backstage processes—the rules, reviews, and workflows that keep a service running—are treated like someone else’s problem. They’re built in isolation, lag behind the user experience, and make it nearly impossible for staff to do their jobs well.

I was brought in to help design one of these critical backstage engines. The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) had just been handed the responsibility of regulating the UK’s new Forest Risk Commodities (FRC) law. My job? Help them design their first ever end-to-end regulatory flow—how they would manage business exemptions, review annual submissions, monitor compliance, and escalate enforcement. And do it before the policy had been finalized, with a team still being assembled.

This wasn’t just a regulatory admin task. This was about building the foundations of compliance in a way that wouldn’t just serve the agency, but also work in lockstep with the experience of the people and businesses using the service.

APROACH

From Zero to One: Designing and building confidence in regulatory workflow

Demystifying the regulatory function

We didn’t start with process maps—we started with people. With support from our research lead, I kicked things off by treating regulators as what they are: a critical user group with decisions that shape the entire service. I ran short, exploratory interviews with anyone remotely involved in regulation—mapping their roles, pain points, tools, decision-making powers, and team structures.

These weren’t just fact-finding chats. We used live-mapping to co-create understanding. It helped us spot the major responsibilities, surface team gaps, and (critically) unpack the relationship between regulators and the businesses they were overseeing.

Two insights reshaped our direction:

1. Regulators held the pen on the rules that would directly affect user experience—so we needed them involved in concept design and testing, not siloed off in a policy echo chamber.
2. A clear regulatory pattern emerged: every service had the same backbone—submission review → audit and sampling → casework → enforcement. It was a funnel. That pattern became the foundation for our work.

Co-creating the Workflow

With that structure in hand, I ran two fast-paced co-creation workshops with APHA and Defra’s extended regulatory and policy team. The draft end-to-end flow acted like a spark plug—suddenly everyone could see how their piece fit in. For each stage, we captured activities, decision points, tools, assumptions, and open questions.

The results? Within a week, we had the raw materials for APHA’s first regulatory operating model. I synthesised the chaos into a clear, annotated workflow with evidence-based personas and ownership trails. We also identified 14 key moments where regulatory decisions shaped user experience—things like calculation methods for commodity usage, where inconsistencies could easily create confusion or unfairness for businesses.

Fig.1 – Sample visual of outputs from co-creation workshops

Spotlight on the Case Worker

As the workflow took shape, one thing became obvious: the case worker was the linchpin. This role sat at the centre of triage, audits, escalations, and enforcement. If case workers didn’t have a clear process—or the right tools—the whole regulatory engine would stall.

So we zoomed in. We ran a journey deep-dive and tested early versions of the process with real case workers. This helped us refine the workflow to match real-world tasks, surface bottlenecks, and bake in usability from the start.

Fig.2 – Sample visual of caseworker journey deep dive

Prototyping the Bare Minimum to Unlock Progress

This was the final step in our approach—and a crucial one. While we were already operating a few steps ahead of a typical alpha, this was the moment to stress test everything: the research, the workflows, the assumptions, and the way it all fit together.

We kept it intentionally minimal. No polished UI, no fully working system. Just low-fidelity screens, rough end-to-end user journeys, and realistic scenarios that let us walk through the case worker experience and key regulator decisions. It was scrappy by design—but sharp enough to validate our thinking and surface gaps before they became expensive.

The impact was immediate. For APHA, it brought clarity and structure to a regulatory function that was still forming. It helped them get their house in order fast, identify operational risks, and align around a shared understanding of how their team would actually work.

And for the wider program, it unlocked momentum. The prototype gave us just enough evidence and rationale to justify moving into beta—with confidence. There was still a long road ahead: tech tooling hadn’t been selected, the regulatory team hadn’t been fully resourced, and big policy questions were still unanswered. But we’d built the scaffolding. We had something to build from.

Fig.3 – Sample visual of final regulatory process for phase 1