 Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to a special episode of the service design show. In this episode, we're going to look at the life of an in-house service designer. What's it like to be on the inside? You're going to hear about the challenges in-house service designers face like how to build a design culture, how to break down internal silos and how to spread service thinking in a very product and tech driven environment. Of course, you'll also get some practical tips and advice on how to navigate around these challenges. So even if you're not currently working in-house, I think these stories will be super useful. The brief background to this episode is that more and more organizations are building internal service design capabilities. But the reality is that a lot of service design teams are still quite small. So if you're an in-house service designer, you often don't have a lot of colleagues and peers around you who you can get feedback from. Being an in-house service designer these days means that you're seen as the expert, the one who has to come up with the answers. But sometimes that can be really challenging if you don't have a benchmark around you. So for all those in-house service designers who want to grow as a professional, I've started organizing the campfires. The campfires are a private mastermind where a small group of in-house service designers get together with their peers from different countries, organizations and industries. We've just completed season 4 of the campfire and in this episode you're going to hear the stories of the campers who are part of this group. They all are in-house service designers, but from very different organizations, ranging from the Swedish tax office to the fashion giant salando. They're going to give you a sneak peek what happens behind the curtains at these organizations. You'll learn which challenges they face and like I said, you'll also get some practical tips and advice on how you can be more successful as a service designer. If you're also an in-house service designer who wants to connect with peers from across the globe, join us for an upcoming campfire. The application for the next round has just started and you can find all the details on how to apply at servicedesignshow.com slash campfire. We only have room for eight participants, so there's quite a strict application process. Again, if you want to join, head over to servicedesignshow.com slash campfire and read how to apply. And now we're going to jump into the stories of the service design professionals who did apply to the campfire. Let the show begin. Welcome to the show everybody. Hello. Hello. Yes, that was the thing I was waiting for. A new group of campers who will be sharing their best practices, learnings, maybe pitfalls on how to be more successful as an in-house service designer. Let's jump right in. You'll get introduced to everyone, but we're going to start with somebody and not just somebody, we're going to start with Ben. Hey, Ben, could you give a short intro of who you are and what made you sign up for the campfire? Sure. My name is Ben McCammon. I work as a director of service innovation at a Canadian-based company called McKenzie Investments. So we are basically like an investment management company. We create mutual funds and ETFs and other products like that. So I lead a small in-house team. We sit within operations, so we collaborate with call center teams and back office teams and all sorts of folks who deal with technology and employee experience and customer experience. And what brought me to the campfire was even though I didn't know all these people yet, it was the opportunity to get to know people like me who work in-house because at my company, most of the folks that I collaborate with are not service designers or customer experience designers or any of that, they're business people and financial planners and all sorts of other things. So I was really looking forward to, I guess, learning from this group and being able to have some dialogue around things and talk to people who kind of get it and sort of learn from what's been successful from them or not successful. So that also helps. So I think among pairs that usually is a nice experience. So you aren't surrounded by a lot of service designers in your professional environment. What are some typical challenges that you face being in-house as a service designer? I mean, there's a few. I'd say one is just, so I came from being a consultant. So that's part of the adjustment for me, too. A few years ago, I was just doing this as a consultant. So coming in-house, I think I've had to learn that there's a lot more legwork that has to happen in order to create projects, opportunities, right? So when I was a consultant, it was kind of like, oh, somebody says we have some money to spend, somebody puts out an RFP or somebody reaches out and says, hey, we want to work with you again. What you don't realize is all the sort of foundational work and all the stuff that's been happening in the background to get to that point. So now doing this kind of work in-house, I'm realizing that that's a huge amount of effort and comes along with, it requires different skills than just executing the work or using the methods and doing the actual services I work. There's all this other stuff that you have to do. And maybe we'll touch on more of that in a bit. So that would be one. I think the other thing is, for me right now, I'm working within a company that's undergoing a lot of change. So they're changing technology. They're changing ways of working. The industry is changing. There's all sorts of change happening. So in that kind of environment, when you're leading a team who also says, hey, we like to come and change stuff, a lot of people are like, yeah, there's enough changing already. So it's sort of understanding how to still be able to make things happen and be able to improve things when you're working in a company that maybe there's already lots and lots of big changes happening and sort of spanning over multiple years. So again, I don't know if some of the other folks in the campfire can relate to that, but I think that's another big change that as an in-house service designer, you have to kind of grapple with what are people already trying to do and what kind of changes are already happening in the organization. Yeah, let's not give away too many challenges and leave a few for the other campers. So having been in this group for now five weeks and having listened to these stories, what would your biggest piece of advice be for somebody who wants to be more successful, impactful as an in-house service designer? I would say so one of them would be it depends. It depends what kind of team you're working on. So I think if your team is is new, like brand new, or if you're the person who's if it's just you, you're the team or you're starting the team, I think it's very different. But I would say one piece of advice if your team is not new is don't wait too long to find out the history of the team and what happened before and what led to that being created. So in my case, even though in hindsight it seems sort of like a no-brainer, I probably waited a full year from when I joined before I actually kind of said, OK, let me really understand the history of the team and where it came from and what were all the sort of little versions of it and eras that happened before I joined because in my case, the team had actually existed for more than five years. So yeah, understand the history. So you kind of know, like, then you can figure out where you need to go next. I don't know why it took me a year to sort of sit down and collect that collect that history to kind of like pull it out of the brains of probably a bunch of different people. It's not like nobody's going to hand it to you written down in a little book. That would be one of them. Yeah, become a historian. I've heard that one a few times already. And I think it's a good scale to to master as a service designer. My final question to you would be, what do you think you'll remember from this campfire experience in a year time? I think for me, it's been the emphasis on relationship building. We've talked a lot about that. And that's that's something I think I'm going to take away. You know, I mean, not just that relationships are important, but I think somebody shared this line, one of the other campers here, you know, like organizations run on relationships. And I think it's one thing to kind of know, oh, yeah, relationships are important. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's another to really sort of understand how critical they are to the success of doing something like service design and how, you know, for me, what I'm taking is I need to be actively paying attention to relationships and thinking about not just, oh, they're good, but how am I investing in them? How am I building them and and and doing that really deliberately as opposed to just focusing on the work, let's say. Yeah, and the campfire is a great place to, I would say, build connections, networks, friends, making new connections on relationships. Thank you, Ben. I'm going to move on to the next camper and hear their story. And in this case, it's Diana. Diana, could you give a brief intro of who you are and what made you join the campfire? Yes, sure. So my name is Diana. I work as a service designer. It's a Swedish tax agency in Stockholm. And what made me to join was that I I was looking for inspiration. I was feeling alone. I have extremely talented colleagues, but yet sometimes you need to get out. And right now it's kind of sort of hard to get out there. I mean, there are conferences, but they're still online. So you kind of you still have the same urge to meet people and to share your experiences and to exchange. And it was a really great way of doing that. I had no expectations, but it was definitely exceeded. I'm curious. You work at the Swedish tax office agency. What is if you would have to pick one, the biggest challenge you face as an in-house service designer? The top one, perhaps, is that people think solutions. So instead of thinking, OK, what are we selling in this service? We think about. I mean, before even going in like a research, they already have a solution in their heads that it will be the digital services, because what else can it be? That's the biggest challenge that we that I'm fighting every day, pretty much. Yeah, this is also something I hear from a lot of service designers who are in a product driven environment. I'm curious if your piece of advice is related to this. So what would you say to somebody who wants to be more successful as an in-house service designer? My advice, perhaps, is I mean, we we get to talk about that sometimes a designer can feel a bit alone. Stefan was sharing a lot of experience because I mean, it's a new area or kind of new area, and sometimes you're alone in a company. I think the best advice is to get out and try to talk people and make connections. Sometimes really books is not enough. So that's perhaps because sitting alone, you you can kind of miss things. For example, that thing that Ben mentioned that, you know, it's very important to understand the history and that you didn't think of that before. But how could you know that you can't just know everything. So when you talk to people, you get a lot of insights that you can apply. And you really work. And this makes me think that there is a book next to me, which is called Get Lucky. It's a funny title, but it's actually about increasing serendipity. And I think the campfire is one of those examples where you can increase serendipity. Like you said, even without having expectations up front, you go in, you are open, you ask questions, you listen, and then you learn things that you didn't know up front, you didn't know, right? Yeah, exactly. What is the thing that you'll remember in a year time? And I would be a bit practical here, but I got we start talking about jobs to be done. And that's actually a way to move from thinking solution to the problem. And that's something that I I started like reading a lot and spreading to my colleagues in my organization. And we're like, this is the good stuff. We're reading books about it. So I think it's one of the practical things that are taking away with me. So that I will spread it further. I think that's a very good, measurable way of saying what I'm taking from. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, something that's really practical that you can apply and you are applying the next day in your practice. Yeah, pretty much. So sorry for that. Thanks, Diana. We'll be in touch for sure. I'm going to move on to the next camper. And that is David. Same question to you, David. Who are you? Why did you sign up? OK, David, especially here, I'm leading business strategy as we call it to the area in my company, Find a Sense, which is a consultancy firm specialized in marketing services to big companies, big brands or iconic brands like Coca-Cola or, you know, a group of Santander and that kind of companies. Business strategy in my company. It's a blended operation among strategy by itself, service design and strategic design innovation. And we take care of or we look after improving our portfolio of services to our clients and also a company, the consultants and the team that the teams that are providing services to our clients with new mindsets, new perspectives to improve the final delivery on these kind of services. What brought me in the campfire was some sort of the same root cause of it. I'm I'm a long life learner and I like very much as you call that. I noted that that book, increasing or, you know, a certain dbt or, or, or, or, yeah, increasing certain dbt is a good way to to to frame it. Just to learn from from other industries, other approaches, so the perspectives from other service designers and what's what failed in such well, in certain situations, what succeeded in certain situations. And because maybe I'm wrong in the way I'm approaching to to the way of of transforming my own company. So that's pretty much even if you're not wrong, you might still learn ways how things can be improved. So that's also a very good attitude to enter the campfire. You are in a more senior position, I would say, than most campers. And still, I'm sure you have challenges as an in-house service designer. What would you say is a typical challenge you face? A common challenge, both in in-house, in the company, in my company and in the client side, in the corporate side of business in the companies is silo the structures and the way these silos think by by itself or as an entity. Every silo tries to protect itself from the rest of either ideas, perspectives or from others, because they build trust from within or inside out the silo. And it's once any any department or functional area is built and it gets a certain success throughout time. They believe that the truth is just one, but the one that is that comes from from within that silo. So the main challenge is how to get adoption from from from outside into those silos. And do you have a piece of advice how we can do that? Yeah, most of the of these challenges has to be yeah, they are they are connected to the approval processes of of ideas, projects, programs or or by itself, budget and any idea or any implementation, either if it is inside your company or if it is for a client, it needs to go through the through the financial staff. And I always always talk the same the same story as service designers. We are pretty biased on the disability, disability and the feasibility fields of design, strategic design, the human certain center design and the technical side. But the decision makers are very lent to into the the financials and service designers. We all need to to go in and talk about profit. What's what's in the plate of the decision makers? What what what these ideas is is bringing into the to the business for them and for the rest of the company to to improve or grow or grow your business language? That's basically what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. What is your biggest takeaway or insight from the last four weeks? Yeah. Mostly mostly the same just to to deepen in in that in that same recommendation, I say, financials are very, very important. And this leads me to to depending to the what's in the mindset of of the people that needs to to adopt the ideas. So and that's something that's also got in the or appeared in our campfire sessions about what is our job as service designers to do the the work of of getting adopted. This this idea is not the is not the job of them. The decision makers to do it. We need to convince and to influence. So mostly, yeah, in a nutshell, it's a matter of working and building influence and along with Ben, very in agreement with within building relationships and influence ecosystems are very, very important. Yeah, I second that building a business vocabulary, building our influence on decision making. We have to understand how a company operates and financials are an important ingredient there. Thanks for sharing, David. I'm going to move on to the next campaign. In this case, it's Caroline. Hi, Caroline. Hey. Could you share a little bit about who you are and also what made you sign up for the campfire? Yes, of course. So I'm Caroline and I'm a service design lead in the French insurance company within an innovation team. And what brought me to the campfire was simply I was curious about what it is like to be a service designer in other companies and other countries also. And if there are also common patterns between us and also getting other perspectives of similar issues. And yeah, that's all. Awesome. What are typical or what is the most important challenge that you face as an in-house service designer? I think it's a lot about design culture and how might we create a design culture for everyone in the company? What are the tools, methods, guidelines? As the mind said, we have to introduce in the company because it's almost easy when you have one standardized team. But when there are several teams in different departments with different backgrounds, it's really hard to coordinate and deliver a consistent experience for the customer. And that's my main challenge. And is your piece of advice tied to creating a design culture within the organization? Or do you have a different piece of advice? Yes, I think we all have a topic on building relationships and because I think that service designer is a team sport. And if you want to make a change in your company, so you need to be connected with others, understand the drivers, the intentions and the inner motivations of your interlocutors and take a coffee with them and just ask how are you doing? It works. It sounds so easy, right? But I even, for myself, added a weekly agenda item to just be in touch with people, with students, with campers and doing it without a fixed agenda. So just calling people up and seeing how they're doing. And that's basically, I think, also with your advocating. Yeah, I agree. What is the thing that you hope you'll remember in a year time about the campfire? I think I will remember the campers simply. And the kind of advices I had. And I really love also how it was structured as a 90 minutes to listen. And then we can share our stories and informational discussions for the rest of the week. I really appreciate that. And the feeling also of having a little in-house community in the vast world of design, it was really helpful. We're in-house service and distributed in-house service design team working at different organizations. Thank you, Caroline. We're going to move from France to Germany. Hello, Stefan. Hello, Mark. Hey, I'm not seeing you, but I hope the rest is. Could you give a brief intro of who you are and how did you end up in the campfire? Yeah, thanks. So I hope everyone can see me. So my name is Stefan Joost. I work as a service designer and technology consultant for Invencity, which is a technology consultancy, mainly working in the automotive industry in Germany. And I have different kind of interests in joining the campfire. It was actually interesting to join the format of the campfire itself. So having the feeling at least to sit around a campfire and sharing stories, maybe listening to music also, which is kind of interesting, but especially learning from others experienced service designers and getting excited also what is happening at the campfire. So a little bit of surprise was there for me as well. But also the chance to be in the hot seat at some point and share my own story and let's say get advice from six very experienced service designer from different fields. Was what excited me about being part of the campfire. Yeah, we have, of course, sharing stories is what happens at a campfire, at least from my perspective. And it's a lot about listening, asking questions, but it's also about if you have a piece of advice that relates to somebody's experience. We also shared that. So it was an interesting experience. I'm curious, Stefan, what would you say is a typical challenge in how service designers face? So a typical challenge could be a service design is kind of like a new discipline and in design, but also in the industries that we are working in. So introducing service design as an approach for me, for example, into a technical focused company was quite a challenge and is still a challenge because explaining the approach itself and showing their effects immediately is not the easiest part of it, especially if you work together with people that are very technically focused and let's say, like, look, you have a technical solution and it's very easy and you see the effects immediately. And then showing the team, OK, it's very helpful to use the services and approach in our company as well. And you will see the effects maybe later on or maybe in small changes is and was quite difficult for me and to find the support, actually, to introduce this approach into a company totally. Yeah, welcome to the club. Explaining what we do and especially to people who are used to having and seeing very tangible results. Yeah, it's still something we are we're working on. Is your piece of advice related to this or do you have a different piece of advice to share? No, actually, well, my piece of advice is a little bit abstract, let's say, because what I'm trying to explain people is you need one, you need the top management to introduce service design as they have to have your back, especially as this approach is not maybe working immediately and you see the effects immediately from the from the start on when you implement a new project, but later on. So you will need the backup of the top management to have their support. It doesn't matter if it's for a small project internally or maybe a bigger project that is going to be externally. But also from the other side, I'm convincing, or let's say convincing the people bottom up and what are the effects of services and in their daily lives or what they can be, even the smaller changes is quite important. So try to find fans for the approach as well. Try to find people that will be part of your movement to make services and bigger in your company. So this is my biggest piece of advice. I would be curious to hear if you have any ideas on how to how to find fans. Well, usually you would say do successful projects, basically, but maybe even if you fail, you can show people that this approach works maybe also in other companies and other industries. So in my opinion, it's going to be one of the biggest topics in this decade now. It's going to be service design. And so maybe people will follow you automatically or maybe you have to convince them a little bit more with successful projects or explaining them the approach itself. What would you say is your biggest learning or takeaway from this experience? So it still has to do something with what I was mentioning before. So my biggest learning is that how difficult it is to implement service design in the different companies, but also across different industries. As we see, we have someone from the Swedish Tax Agency and we have people from financial companies, technology companies. So it's in every industry, you can say, look, we're just starting right now. And it is very important to build up this resilience to actually get projects done successfully at some point. Yeah. So I think this is my biggest learning from this. Yeah. And I like your resilience highlight because it's easy to get demotivated when you don't see things moving as quickly as you hope. And don't give up, stay in the game. And sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes you're not in the right environment and have to move on to a different company, maybe, but don't quit. That's I think the most important message, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, thanks, Stefan. Let's move on to the next camper. We're going to fly across the ocean and we're going to LA. In this case, good morning, Martina. Good morning. Good night. Awesome that you're here. I'm really curious. What made you sign up and also who are you? So my name is Martina. I'm a Brazilian designer based in California, Los Angeles right now. And right now I'm working in a health care company here. And what brought me to the campfire was that I'm right now working in a very small team. It's kind of a team of two persons. And it's just me. I have a partner and an hour boss. So what brought me here was the desire to connect with other service designers and to understand their reality. And I've seen this quite often in the campfire that people are joining because they're just a team of one or maybe two. And it's it's nice to have colleagues around you, even though they are not physically present. So if you are in such a situation, I encourage you to also consider joining the campfire. Martina, what would you say? What would have you found to be a typical challenge for in-house service designers? Interesting that question, because that was something that I realized by kind of being in the campfire, kind of listening to your other stories, something related to the lack of accountability that we have inside the company. So as service designers, we often do exercise and do activities to help people to see from a more broad perspective, kind of how can you see that problem from, you know, how can you see the bigger picture? But then they don't know what to do with that because there is no accountability. No one is kind of really saying that, OK, so I'm able to fix this. So, yeah, I think this is working as a service designer in company. This is I think it's one of the biggest challenges, trying who is accountable, who is responsible to move on and fix the things. That's a great point. And that's definitely a challenge when we're working holistic in a holistic way. We cross silos, cross departments. There's usually like who owns that experience, who owns that service when you're trying to fix things that are holistic. That's that's challenging. Is your piece of advice related to this? A little bit, but I would say that. I think that might be some of the eyes for other service designers that kind of every time that you feel alone, kind of it's super important to connect with other service designers, trying to find other service designers. And meetups or kind of it's so important to connect to you to learn from others experience. And so that's why the Empire was kind of a great experience for me to learn from other experience. And if you have to reflect what is the thing that you learned from the experience and follow us in this case? Oh, I have learned so much here, but I'm going to just share something that I learned from a participant here in the group. So Adam was talking one day briefly about how other service designers how oftentimes service designers are just good facilitators. And they have never built a service itself, kind of. They just do good workshops, but they have never really working in and kind of build a service from scratch or kind of because everything and that really that's inside that is kind of inside my head. Like, OK, so how can I how can I be part of everything? Kind of, you know, when I used to be when I was working as a UX designer, I was usually part of the whole process and I was delivering things and I feel that I was part of everything. But as a service designer, there's a lot of projects that are just part of that at the beginning. And then we have other teams kind of building this. And then I feel like really distanced from from the real solution when they deliver that. So I think that something that I'm looking for right now after this camp is kind of how can I be more connected with the projects that I start and to the end so I can have that feeling that OK. So I really accomplish something kind of I follow this through not only in the beginning of the process. Yeah, that's that takes time and that takes patience. Going from inception to delivery of a service can take a while, depending on your context. Will be monitoring your journey, Matina, that's for sure. Thanks for sharing. And you mentioned Adam already. So, yeah, why not? Let's move on to Adam. Hi, Adam. Hi, how are you doing? I'm doing awesome. You know what the two starting questions are, so take it away. Yeah, sure. So I'm Adam. I'm a product designer from Zalander working in an in-house studio, I would say, with different design teams and product managers, engineers to build the starting place for fashion in Europe. What actually brought me to the campfire was a good friend recommendation from Natalie. She's a designer of an NYC and she said that I should get on board and it was curiosity that took me the rest of the way, I would say. And also, we were lucky enough to have Mark as a guest at Service Design Drinks Berlin, which is another event that I organize. And so I was, of course, obliged to sign up and participate. It seems that curiosity is a common theme when people sign up and I'm very thankful for you having the confidence in actually getting into an experience, not knowing upfront what it what it will bring. And what would you say is a typical challenge for in-house service designers? A typical challenge, I would say, is getting productive and making services. But also I would say another big challenge is to increase the people's mindset of what service thinking is. People often I find in Zalando are very transactional and in their products and in the tech scene itself. And how do you change people's minds? So this is one thing that I find is challenging for in-house designers to get people to think in services, who you're serving, how you're serving them and getting them to be, I guess, human centred. But another challenge I would say is that everyone faces is that you're designing for people, yes, but you're also designing with people. So to also look at yourself designing with the people that you're going to produce these products and services with, which is a big challenge. I think we learned how important people are in the design process in producing designs, but also how it affects people in the end. Yeah, I totally agree. We have so much focus on the end user, but the people we're designing with are also people. And layering on top of that, we maybe even have to start with ourselves and seeing ourselves the designer as the person. So maybe that's the next frontier. Adam, do you have a good piece of advice for in-house service designers who want to be more impactful? Yeah, I think understanding people like it's been mentioned before in this session is talking and understanding people, having empathy for people that you work for is a great starting point. You're not going to be the hero of all services. You're not going to be the hero designer that does everything themselves. You will need your team. You will need the people around you. And it is what you know as well and your skills and talents, but it's also who you know and how you can empathize and work with them. And I think books that look at emotions in the workplace or making a manager, these books that really focus on the other side of being a designer, not the task oriented side, but the empathy heart people said, that's a great place to start. You always need those skills no matter what you're doing and practice those skills every day. So what were the two books you referenced? One is Making a Manager by Julia Tsu and the other one is Emotions in the Workplace and I've lost the book. They're both fantastic books. I will add the links to the show notes. Adam, also the question for you. What will you remember in a year time from this campfire experience? Yeah, I think what I would take away from this is no matter where you are in the world, no matter what level you are at in the design career in your journey, that there are common things and common challenges that kind of work along the way. I think that's what everyone else has kind of realized, is that in my corner of the world, I thought things were very different. But I can see now in the US there's similar challenges and all over Europe there's similar challenges. And I would assume that also in Asia and Australia there's similar challenges and it's about how we work with people, how we collaborate and how we actually drive impact. And I don't think there's a silver bullet, which makes me very upset sometimes. But I love that we're all struggling together, which is really, really nice. Yeah, it's much better to struggle together than to struggle alone. And I think that's a very important value proposition of the campfire. If you want to be part of the upcoming campfire group, head over to serbsdesignshow.com slash campfire and read the instructions on how to apply. The application deadline for the next group is April 26th, 2021. And like I said in the beginning, we only have space for eight participants. I review the applications in the order that I receive them. So to increase your chance of getting in, make sure to submit your application right after this episode. Once again, you can find all the details on how to apply at serbsdesignshow.com slash campfire. I hope you found these stories useful, even if you're not an in-house service designer. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one.