 It's not uncommon that as a service designer, you end up in an environment that is strongly product focused, whether that product is an app or maybe even a car. In this episode, you're going to learn how to successfully make service design work in these environments. So if you're interested in that, make sure you stick around. Here's the guest for this episode, let the show begin. Hi, I'm Christian Adlot. This is a service design show, episode 128. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are the invisible things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that make a positive impact on people and business? Our guest in this episode is Christian Appelt. Christian is the head of service design at Polestar and Polestar is the manufacturer of one of the most iconic electric cars at this moment. Christian's task is to lead and scale service design within Polestar. And due to the success of Polestar, they are quickly growing, figuring out how to successfully embed and organize service design within this context is an interesting journey. And in this episode, Christian is going to share some of his most important learnings with you. You're going to learn why it's important to build a common and shared language across all stakeholders and how to actually do that. And we'll also dig into the never ending challenge of how to demonstrate the value that you're bringing as a service design team to the business. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to level up your service design skills, make sure to click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified whenever a new episode comes out. So that's all for the intro. And now let's quickly jump into the interesting conversation with Christian Appelt. Welcome to the show, Christian. Hi, Mark. Good to have you on. I think this is going to be a really interesting episode, at least for me, because I've seen which topics we're going to discuss. Christian, you have a rich history for the people who haven't looked you up and linked in yet, could you give a short introduction of who you are and what you do these days? Yeah, absolutely. Currently, I'm working at Polestar, Polestar Performance AB, heading up a unit we call Service Design Unit. And before I came to Polestar two and a half year ago, I was at IKEA and before that at SKF, a ball bearing manufacturer. In both cases, I was focusing on innovation and innovation leadership and for the people who don't know yet who or what Polestar is. That will, of course, change in a few years. Everybody will know it. What is Polestar? Polestar, it's a new electrical vehicle company, performance brand, very much design focused. And it's really exciting because we focus a lot on new business models, business to consumer. That's where we started. So we sell cars directly online and also keeping the customer journey close to us. So we have that customer relationship with us all the time and not just an OEM. We're going to talk a lot about service design within a car manufacturer today. But before we dive into that, Christian, I want to go over quick rapid fire question around with you five questions and the ideas to answer them as quickly as possible. Let's start with question number one. Christian, what's always in your fridge? That's good. It's milk and it's butter. Milk and butter. OK. There are so many books behind you, but which one are you reading right now? It's actually, yeah, it's actually this one. I got it from from your one of your talks here. Orc design for design orcs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Peter Murals. Yeah, very recommendable. Yeah, I agree. Question number three is which superpower would you like to have? Mind reading. Mind reading, yeah. Become an anthropologist and you'll get you'll get quite far. Close to it. What did you want to become when you were a kid? I was actually I wanted to be like exploring biologist and going in deep into the jungle and exploring new medicines and stuff like that. OK. Your career took an interesting turn. Finally, you're all about service design these days, but do you remember when you first heard about the term or got in touch with it? Yeah, it was maybe six, six years, six, seven years ago. You see, I think it's really interesting, these topics, because you suddenly realize that you have done or worked with service design all your life. You have this holistic approach where you move from from really abstract levels down to details up and back and forth and up and down. So, but as a as a topic, it was actually only six years ago. And I've heard many stories of people saying I've been doing service design for years only just to recently realize that there is a term for it. So that sounds sounds like a very familiar story. Christian, when did Polestar sort of get when did they start? When did they start the company? Yeah, of course, it's Polestar where does it come from? It was an engineering company working on how to tune a car, racing cars and also conventional Volvo cars. And it was it went from that brand into a wait a minute. We have an electric car coming up in originating from Volvo. So it was Volvo who bought that this tuning company and then moved it into the electrical vehicles space and focusing on performance, performance EV brand. So the reason why I'm asking this and the reason why sort of the context or the heritage of the company is important because often when service design gets embedded into an organization, it's not from the start, right? It's often and especially in a manufacturing oriented environment. Like service design isn't the first thing that a company establishes. And I want to talk with you today about how did service design evolve with this within Polestar? What are some challenges? What are some opportunities that you see? So let's dive a little bit into that and maybe the first question is how did service design get into a company that is all about manufacturing features and cars, tangible stuff? Yeah, I think if we look specifically at Polestar, we're really lucky because we have a CEO, Thomas Inglat, who he's a designer by heart. He's the head of design in his set and was set in Volvo and he became the CEO of Polestar. And if we go back a few years, like three years, when it was apparent that we would be this EV brand and started out on, OK, we're starting out with marketing and things like that. Before that, there's been some pioneers really looking into the customer journey of performance EV car brand. So it's actually has had service design. We've had that with us all the time, design thinking approach. But then really quickly, it was all about go to market and getting all those MVPs out there. So we moved from really hard focus on search design then to product organization and now we're kind of moving back and having the customer centric approach when we have these real customers with us. And one of the questions that I get often and that is also addressed in that book, Org Design for Design Orgs, is where do you place service design inside an organization? And again, especially in organizations, that that's probably very much oriented on the tangible thing. Can you can you share a little bit? Where is it now? Where has it been? At Polestar, we're kind of located, so to say, in the digital organization. But we have not had so much focus on the organization as such. It has been an organic growth. We've expanded really quickly and it's been focused on what do we need to do? What do we need to accomplish and just do that together? But now we're moving into a kind of scale up of the company and then we need some more structure and more structure to define what needs to be able to scale. So before we dive into that scaling part, I'm really curious, you're sort of part of the digital side of the company. Why is that? I can make some assumptions, but I'm curious what your take on that is, how did that evolve? Yeah, so as I said, it's very much an organic development and doing things together. And we talk about Polestar being a truly digital company in the sense that it's not like we and them are taking over something that should be executed. It's how do we build that together with the stakeholders that are responsible for different services towards the customers? So I think it's just almost a coincidence that what has happened because you could actually, at least from my opinion, you could put it in business development or marketing or digital. Or, yeah, any place as long as you collaborate and have alliances within the organization. So with regards to alliances, you mentioned also to me that there is a customer experience team. How is your relationship between service design, maybe the digital team, the customer experience team? How is that currently operating? It's, I would say, a joint venture in the means that we're working totally together. We have set up team sessions like weekly meetings and things like that, where we look into challenges that we have both from digital and customer experience team. And we kind of, we could look at it as the customer experience team provide the direction and the tools on insights and analytics and so on. And the service design team is the executors, the researchers, the explorers and the ones who facilitate the finding the right questions about what should we do now? Or later or not at all? So I'm curious. And I would love to hear if you can share an example of what is it that the service design team actually has done or worked on? Like what is a, quote unquote, typical service design challenge within Polestar? Yeah, we have moved a lot from focusing on the digital products as such. Since they have very much been in the piece and then. Sorry to interrupt you, but a digital product is. Yeah, sorry. So it's the, yeah, you have your own nomenclature and stuff like that. But it's the interface that you have with the customer being digital. It could be on a website, an order page or a product page or or a tool that you use when you sign up people for a test drive or. The individual digital Dutch points, right? Exactly. Yeah. OK, so it's been very much about them as such. And then then we have kind of moved further upstream and also kind of on a higher level when it comes to a holistic approach closer to actually what do what do we need to accomplish here? Not just in that this kind of section or micro journey, but from a more holistic perspective of the company and looking into different areas we have we have managed to to pull the stakeholders with us and make make them use of service design as a competence for strategic decisions and so on, prioritise things. When should we do things or not and so on? That sounds like a dream to a lot of service designers actually being able to be in that strategic position and be able to help influence decision making. Again, I'm curious. Is there a recent example or project where you felt that service design really contributed to making a smarter or a better decision? Yeah, we just kind of the last year here, especially the last six months here, we've we've seen where it's referenced. You see how how business stakeholders or key stakeholders, as we call them, use design thinking and and service design language talking to each other on on when to to do what and so on. So it's more or less everywhere, but at the same time, there are also different different stakeholders that are more aware and less aware. So it's we talk a lot about how can we lift the floor for for everyone and of course, it's a bit sensitive for me to kind of dive into specifics and so on. But there are a lot of it's when we help the key stakeholders ask questions, they are often they are looking for for solutions. But as we kind of take them on this journey, they start to explore things and start to ask questions. And then there's as we kind of always wish for people to ask the right questions. So that's really rewarding in the work that we do. And it's also something that have grown the awareness inside the company and also, yeah, how we communicate and so on. Now, you have a team of about how large is the team? How would you? Yeah, so we we call it the service design unit. Yeah, it's a plus plus plus 60 people. OK, it's not it's not just service designers. It's business analysts and digital designers, UX, UI and so on. So yeah, yeah. The reason why I'm asking that is, OK, let's say it's a service design unit of about 60 people. One of the questions that a lot of designers struggle with in a business context is how do you justify having 60 people, 60 designers in a company? Now, you have a head start because your CEO is a designer. So that conversation will be a lot easier. But how do you how do you show your relevance to the business? Yeah, so it's maybe I should kind of state that it's we're not 60 plus service designers as such, but everyone is aware of service design and has a different levels of understanding and awareness and so on. So I would say we are like 12 dedicated service designers. And it's actually about you need to show your result. You can't just talk about it. And it's easy to get in. I've seen that when I was at SKF and when I was at IKEA and things like that. It's easy that you you talk about it, what if and so on. But you need to really find these right questions and and make them actionable. So you actually get something out. You can't present a report. You can't present a report or a finding an insight without making it actionable. And then you suddenly get the whole cloud of options which you can choose from. And that makes it easy for key stakeholders to to decide then they don't want to have to have open questions, even if they have been part of bringing them forward. When they need to go forward, they need to make a decision and that's on on what they can act on. And what I'm hearing you say presenting an insight isn't enough for stakeholders to act upon. There needs to be a piece of advice like basically based on this insight, we would recommend to do X, Y and Z. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. You need to understand what what what do we want to accomplish. And and through those questions narrowing on and through those questions narrowing on on on where we would like to go. And it needs to be an optional scope. You can't just have one one direction or one decision. You need to to be able to in time or in effort and things like that or things that you can act on. And and when you're able to do that, when you're able to when you know together like we're trying to increase conversion or increase retention or all those other business metrics and you're able to connect an insight that you have from the service design project to how that could help your stakeholder to actually do that. That's when your business value is justified. Is it as simple as that? Yeah, or it would be nice. Yeah, I know. There's all this but or however you need to actually remove risk as well. Because if you want to do something, it's an assumption always. You can't know until afterwards. So then you need to remove the risk as well. So how can we what is the least thing you can do to test this assumption? And that's also a journey in itself to to remove it from OK. Being is if it's a big opportunity, then suddenly you try to look into the business case of it and it kind of grows and grows. And then when it grows, the activity, the risk increases. So you need to minimize the activity to show the validate it as quickly as possible. So yeah, this is where again, a lot of service designers get stuck because there is always a level of uncertainty, of exploration, of risk. And that's not what most managers are in the business of. Most managers are in the exact opposite like scaling, standardizing. How do you even get started? Yeah, that's this is, I think, as you say, this is the continuous challenge of service designers and kind of innovators as such to to move from from kind of or actually move stakeholders into the being comfortable with the uncertainty. And if there is a high risk of of jeopardizing what is currently, then then the economic sub of decisions tell you that you should not make the move. But if there is if you can show metrics that you your you will actually not reach your your goals or your your your where you would like to be or it will be really bad. If you don't make this small, small change, then you will end up down here. Then Conaman has said that it's three times more likely to make that decision going forward if you kind of understand what would happen if you would not do it. Right. Yeah. And this is one, at least from if I'm interpreting this correctly, showing the price of not doing or not investing in service design, like making the opposite business case, we don't know what what the potential benefit will be. But we know if we don't do anything or keep on the same track, like the project, right? Is that exactly? And that's where metrics come in as well. So you have qualitative and quantitative metrics that can help you with that and identify sources of metrics like customer support, social media, or just talking to customers. And you need to let that talk for you as well. What is the relationship between qualitative and quantitative metrics within your unit? It's actually the customer experience team that has defined that setup and also provide all the tools. So we have set up dashboards of metrics that we use to identify challenges and where we can act on it. What is in that dashboard just without raising any company's secrets? Yeah, but everyone has like net-moting scores and so on. But also kind of the most the most common questions from customers, the most frustrations and things like that, where you take the temperature of the customer relationship and kind of massage that information to so you can actually get something out of it. Because there's no value in data if you can't make sense of it. You need to understand what you're looking for. That's everyone can kind of dig into that. What is the what is who sees this dashboard within the organization? Who has who is exposed to it? It's the CX team, which uses it as a strategic tool, but also in conjunction with key stakeholders that are responsible for different areas where we have identified or targeted them as stakeholders. And I can imagine that this is a great lever sort of to see if you're actually having influence that you I love the idea of just having the most common questions or the most common complaints. That's like a really tangible quote unquote metric that you can work on and that it's visible and that it's agreed upon that this is something which is important to the entire organization. Yeah, of course, you can start to work with the data then that over time it will be different questions, but it will also be different questions on different markets and so on. You need to understand that you have different maturity of especially in the EV sector. You can see that in countries where electric vehicles are really established, the maturity is much more different than other markets and so on. And you need to act on them locally. I'm already and now we're getting into a very tactical stuff, but I think it's really crucial. Like maybe in the ideal situation before doing any service design work, people should think about setting up a dashboard just to have an idea of what the thing is that we want to influence together. And often it's very in service time project specific. This project wants to influence this, but it it stays like in a very small pocket rather than seeing if you're actually influencing the thing that everybody agreed upon is important. Yeah, I think you're touching upon the area of transparency. How do you make insights transparent and available for all stakeholders in the organization? And that's something that we have realized quite recently. We were looking early on into what are the artifacts of the service design and using them as a metric on how mature the organization is. But we had challenges in different teams producing customer journeys and so on looking slightly different. And if it's not your topic, you have difficulties reading it or understanding it and using it as a reference as well. And that's where we have brought in different tools in the organizations like Mirro and Caster Lens and AHA and so on. So what do those tools solve in this situation for you? I think they solve a common language, an anchor point for discussion and reference. So everyone agrees on the same way of picturing what you're talking about. And then it's much more easy to talk about things. It's like all those canvases that we have. They create a common language for us. It might not be the perfect visualization, but it's at least the same. And we can see the same thing and understand that we come to the table with different perspectives and can use the same language. So rather than having conversations where you have to translate what somebody is actually seeing, you can skip that whole part and actually get into the stuff that's inside of the whatever artifact you present. And that must increase speed, efficiency. Everybody is happier. Yeah, why are service designers seem to be so scattered with using tools? I think if we look at it, it's actually not that many tools that serve us very well in that matter. There are a handful that have risen up the last two or three years now. And before that, we've done diagrams and things like that from different collaboration tools to even PowerPoint or Excel and things like that. But we need to have even using the same colors and things like that so people can subconsciously understand what we're talking about. And I think it's about maturity in the organization or as you talked about before, you're a small team and then you start to create your own language. But if you need to be part of the whole organization then you need to start to communicate and things like that. And that's also something that we've joined up with the internal communication explaining on how we work and the benefits and value of the work. Yeah, that's something that I found really fascinating and interesting when we were preparing this talk. You started collaborating with the internal communications department. I think that's a super smart move. But can you explain what is it that you actually do with the internal communication department and how did that relationship start? Yeah, sometimes when you talk about strategy and things like that, you describe strategy as an intent. But actually, when you look at the truth behind things, most strategies are emerging strategies. So this is an emerging strategy based on an opportunity where we have a colleague joining the communications department, very interested in design thinking, and then reaching out. And when we included her into our organization and then also we have a thesis or a master student in the organization. Together, they started discussing this. And in our weekly meetings, they picked up. We also work with OKRs and so on. And wait a minute, that's something that we could pick up. So organically, it was an opportunity that showed itself and an interest from persons that we nurtured, so to say. And what is happening? What is the synergy between a service design unit and an internal communications department unit? Yeah, so to be able to create a fantastic company, everyone needs to talk to each other. And we need to create transparency on how we work and so on. So they are very much helping us with that journey and also telling them the story of how we use service design to find opportunities and then following up on how you actually do that and so on. And then following up on the perspectives of service design and the value it gives. So I found that really important. Or actually at IKEA, we did the same when it came to innovation. So it's really important if you're kind of struggling with creating awareness of something you only have so much bandwidth to do things. So you need to find someone to collaborate and make alliances with. I, when I was still doing service design projects long, long time ago, I said that I think 40% of my actual work is communication, capturing what we do, creating a compelling story around that, making sure that people get our, it creates awareness. The reality I think is that often we're just too busy doing the actual work that we sort of neglect the documentation part, the capturing of the story, the capturing of the moment. And then we arrive at the end of a project and we have a deliverable, but nobody has seen the journey. Nobody has seen how it evolved. And we sort of miss those opportunities. Well, people who are in communication, it's their job. They're even much better at it than we are to capture and communicate those stories. So yeah, I hope it's working out for you because I think it's a really smart move. Yeah, it's, I kind of came upon it in SKF, in IKEA and so on. But it's really powerful, you can make it into a habit after every kind of session that you do with your teams and so on. You interview each other on kind of what, almost like a retrospect on what did we do good and what has this given us and so on. And I have a really interesting testimonial that colleagues of mine captured at IKEA were the ways we worked. We worked a lot with design sprints and so on, where there was an external party joining us as an expert and having a testimonial that I've been working with over 40 different companies and the work that we did now in a week, it typically takes like seven to eight months for other companies to do when they do like ordinary pre-studies and so on. So those testimonials can be really, really powerful. And then that draws people towards you and want to collaborate with you. Within the organization, it draws attention within the organization because you're communicating results, you're communicating benefits, you're creating interest and curiosity, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's about making people curious about what you're doing. Yeah, yeah. Now you mentioned already a few things of what has changed and evolved over the last few years like a common language, using the same tools, a dashboard which sounds really good working with internal communication. Has your approach evolved or changed in other ways next to the things we already mentioned? I think it's been more clear. So in the beginning, it was very much organic work and just doing stuff. And as you said, you put so much effort into just do a lot of things and then understanding what matters and being more efficient in how we work, how we communicate, how we, all that has been a journey for us. And now we're entering into a new phase, so to say. We've put a lot of things in place and suddenly we're having a new reality in front of us. How would you describe the new reality? What does it look like? How is it different than the current reality? All reality. So up until now, we've been a well-defined team of all those competences that I talked about before, search designers, business analysts and digital designers who were appointed different tasks together with different teams and so on. And now when we move into a new setup, a new organization, we move in the search design nurse into the product organization, the digital product organization. And if you kind of read what many are writing about challenges in organizations and so on, that typically would not work. But we have an ace up our sleeve, so to say, with our CEO who's very design-driven. We have the CX team and then also defined alliances around what we call journey managers. So you kind of lift up that competence to another level where we have actually establishing an alliance with those who own the customer journey, so to say. Okay, and that's going to be a new role where people are just like maybe a product owner, you'll have a journey owner. Is that like the shift that's going to happen? Exactly. And they will work very much in collaboration. And also we have defined domains of products and so on. So the service designers will report on a domain level that is almost corresponding to the journey manager level. So what could be a domain level? Is that like trade-in or repair or like those kind of domains? Yeah, exactly. So ownership is a broad domain, but in the ownership domain, you have handover and services and things like that. So we have many microjourneys kind of making that area up. In the customer life cycle, you have different stages and within those stages, you have a lot of journeys or microjourneys and people within that same life cycle stage are in the domain. Okay? Yeah. So where do you hope this will end up in three years? Like you're always in the transition, it's always moving, but what's the future vision? Yeah, so three years is a really long time. I know. We've done this in less than three years. And within the next year, we will have this fully working and we will have service design as a strategic tool for making decisions on what to do and what not to do and when and so on. And within three years, we will have people referencing a poll star. This is how you should work with service design. That's my ambition, at least, or our ambition. Your ambition. And you'll be on the show more often. Awesome ambition, that's really ambitious, which is good. Now, we've primarily talked about the things that are working or the things that are going well, but I'm sure that there are also things that you now in hindsight think, well, maybe we could approach it differently or this is a big learning, this was maybe a big mistake. So imagine you could start all over. What is the one thing that you maybe would do differently? Yeah, it's always easy to be smart in hindsight, but I think maybe the customer journey part. However, it's about all those factors allowing you to do that. We got in our customer experience officer in the executive team and that was actually what kicked off everything to actually allow us to work further upstream and things like that. So I think if I would have the influence, I would make sure that we had a kind of designer apart from our CEO then, but in the executive team as well as we have earlier that would have helped us a lot. But it's from an hindsight, it's organically moving forward and I think it's about moving, capturing the opportunities and using service design on yourself and how you work rather than kind of looking at all the difficulties and things like that. And all that changes opportunities for you and that's what service design is all about, I think, capturing those opportunities. Yeah, and I think this is becoming more and more prevalent that where that you see that you can scale service design from their ground up to a certain level, but then you hit a glass floor, glass ceiling, it's not a glass floor, it depends on which level you are, but then you really need support from the top. You need leadership to open the way to actually get it to the next maturity level. Yeah, you can't talk about people don't understand you, because it's your job to make people understand you. So you need to make those alliances and create those insights and perspectives and also understand what other perspectives there is because there is not like one side, it's a double-sided balancing between. Now, a question that just came to my mind, I have a strong opinion about this, but what is your take? Is there, are you in a product industry or are you a service industry? Yeah, I think that's a balance as well. My personal view is that it's a service industry and it's the crux that no one has actually yet found the essence of how you move that perspective, because as soon as you have what you define as a product, as soon as you have someone using it, you're serving someone with that product and as soon as you have a relationship to that person who use your product, then it's a service. But if it's just sell and forget, maybe you could talk about it as a service, but then it's actually also a service because it's about providing that disposable or kind of product. So I'm all focusing on being a service, whatever you provide to someone that someone is using. I'm really curious, if you had to summarize our last 45 minutes, what is the one thing you hope people will remember from this conversation? I think I hope people remember that it's all about finding your way and you have that perseverance in yourself and also finding the alliances that you need to move yourself forward. Coming from innovation leadership and innovation management area, it's not about an idea, it's about what you make out of the idea, it's about the doing and then you need to find ways that suit your environment. There's no kind of silver bullet for anything that is always something that is specific with your organization that you need to take into account and use the service design on yourself, on your own organization to move it forward. Thank you and I can add one more thing to that. I recently had a call with somebody and he asked me if doing a design sprint would help to convince the CEO of the value of service design and I asked them what is on the agenda of your CEO and it was in this case, it was really about hiring people and my question was really simply how is this what you're going to do or whether you're proposing going to help your CEO's agenda? If you want to sell service design, if you want to show the value of it, you need to connect those two things and it's exactly like you said, you just need to apply your own thinking and see your CEO, manager, boss, whatever, as the customer and then everything becomes so much easier. Yeah, show it by doing and not just talking about it. And eat your own dog food, yeah. Christian, I'm really looking forward to what's going to happen within Polestar in the coming months, years. I hope you'll be able to live up to your ambition because that would mean great things for the entire field. Who knows, maybe we'll be back in a few months together and doing an update on where we stand. So thanks a lot for now for sharing where you are with the service design show community. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Awesome that you made it all the way till the end of this conversation. I really hope you got something useful out of it and if you did, click that like button because that helps to get this conversation in front of other service designers like you. And if you haven't done so already, also click that subscribe button to be notified when new episodes come out. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video.