 career paths in service design. Where do I even start? In this episode, you'll learn why it's so important to have clarity in a company, especially around service design roles. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Doug, and this is the service design show, Episode 172. Hi, my name is Mark Fontaine, and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the secrets, lessons, and methods you need to know about to be successful as a service design professional or to help you make greater impact on the challenges that matter to you. Our guest in this episode is Doug Powell, a well-respected executive design leader with track record at companies like IBM and more recently Expedia. Today, Doug helps companies to gain clarity around job descriptions and responsibilities and career frameworks, especially around design roles. Why? Simply because having job clarity is a catalyst for improved performance and employee satisfaction. But as you may have experienced yourself, most companies don't have a clear standard or structure around design roles, let alone a clear career path for design professionals. So rather than waiting for that to change, Doug argues that you can be proactive about it. Start building relationships with HR and help them to put the right career frameworks in place. And in that way, help to elevate the design maturity within the entire organization. So if you stick around until the end of this episode, you'll learn why design isn't well represented in the current career frameworks, which approach you can take to define those clear job descriptions and responsibilities and which compromises you can and can't make when you're working on the organizational plumbing. By the way, if you enjoy conversations like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already because we bring a new conversation like this every week or so. That about wraps it up for the intro. Now it's time to sit back, relax and deep dive into the conversation with Doug Powell. Welcome back to the show, Doug. Hi, Mark. Great to be here. I have a quiz question for you and you haven't prepared. Are you ready for it? Fire away. Yes, I'm ready. So you've been a guest on the show before. Do you recall which episode it was? I was just thinking that and I don't recall what it was, but I know you've been doing the show for about six years and it must have been five years ago. So I'm guessing it's what, 20 or 30 maybe? I double checked it. It was episode 48. It was published on March 22, 2018. We're going to air this episode on March 30, 2023. So it's like almost on the week five years ago. Our anniversary. And nothing has happened in the last five years. Yeah, every five years we need to do this again. That's a good thing. I'll add it to my calendar. Reminder to invite Doug for the next 10-year anniversary. That's right. Yeah, so we're back to revisit some things, what has changed. I would encourage people to look at the episode and listen to episode 48 to get a sense of the zeitgeist back in 2018 and maybe compare it to what's happening today. It's definitely different. Doug, we didn't have this element when you were on in 2018, but this is new. At least it's been going for a while, but it's new for you. I have five simple questions to get to know you as a person next to their professional. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. We won't dive into these questions any deeper, but hopefully we'll get to know you a bit better. Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. There we go. What's always in your fridge? The first thing that came to my mind was mustard. Okay. Why? Anywho, if you could recommend one book for someone to read, which book, would you recommend? I would recommend Notes on an Execution, a thriller from last year. Great book that I read over the holidays. Adding a link in the show notes. Next question is, if you could work from anywhere in the world, which place would you pick? I would pick, I think Barcelona. Although I answer that more on just any place in the world that I'd like to be, but maybe the work part I should consider more, but it's one of my favorite cities. I'll hold on to Barcelona. Okay. Noted. Next question is, what did you want to become when you were a kid? I wanted to be an artist. I was always the kid who could draw when I was young, and I didn't know at the time, I didn't know anything about design or what the possibilities were. So I wanted to do that. I wanted to make pictures. At least in the early part of my career, I was able to do that. Okay. Not going into that topic deeper, so many questions. Final question here is also a tradition. Do you recall the first time you sort of heard about service design? Yes. Yes. I think it was probably when I had a leadership role with the organization in the U.S. called AIGA, which is the professional association for design in the U.S., and I was in that role kind of in the, what are we calling them now, the late aughts. So probably 15 years ago in that role, as I was working with designers of all practices and disciplines across the U.S. and getting to know the profession and how designers were working at that time, and service design was really just coming onto the scene, especially in the U.S. in those years. And so that was when I first began to encounter these really sort of deep, thoughtful, fascinating ways of working as a designer. 15 years ago, yeah. There were the early days. Yeah. And it still sometimes feels as their early days, but it's good to we'll talk about that, I'm sure. But yeah, we did make some problems in the early days. Thank you for sharing that and get to know that we need to send you mustard as a birthday gift or next time you are on stage. Yeah. You said the first thing that comes to your mind. And so there you go. What doesn't go with mustard? Doug, when I say career frameworks for service design professionals, what do you say? Well, I say it's a very important topic. It's one that is very timely. I think as we see service design and design more broadly scaling in complex organizations and companies, we are seeing the need for service design to fit into job architectures and career frameworks that in many cases are already existing in these companies. And if we don't, there's a real risk that the practice will be marginalized. And importantly, that we won't take advantage of those career opportunities that are very present in bigger companies. And so this is the time for us at this, as you said a moment ago, service design is still a relatively new thing. And this is sort of part of the housekeeping of a practice that is maturing and beginning to embed in these bigger organizations. So I think it's an important time, important topic and important time. I had written down here on my notes, it's maybe about finally starting to plug service design into the operating system of the organization. At least it feels like that for me. I think it's good if we start with some context. So you've had very interesting roles in the past decade. What is your relationship to this topic of career frameworks, career paths, like how did this come onto your agenda? Yeah, well, in the last decade, I've spent time with two companies, IBM, and Expedia Group. And in both cases, the central part of my role was to manage and ensure that design practices and design job roles were properly represented in the company's career architecture and career framework. That is a very unsexy, unglamorous job, to be very honest. It's a lot about the plumbing of the company. And in my time, especially at IBM, because I was there for nearly nine years, I discovered that it was, the plumbing was a mess. The plumbing was in really bad shape. And we needed to do some very, very difficult, very intensive work to get under the house, to get in there, roll up our sleeves and just correct things and get things in place so that they were more sustainable. And so that individual designers, service designers, UX designers, design researchers, design technologists were able to progress in their careers according to the work that they were actually doing. That sounds like a very obvious thing, but it wasn't the case when I and my team at IBM first started unpacking that career framework at the company. What we found instead was that there were dozens of different job roles, job titles, job descriptions that had been placed in there at one time or another over the course of many years to the point where it had just grown to this beast of a document. And consequently, the consequences of that were that designers were not being really represented in the career framework in a clear way. So an individual designer could not chart their course, their future path in a way that made sense to them. So there were some important work that we needed to do there. That sounds really interesting. And I think a lot of listeners will be able to relate. And when you say individual designers weren't able to sort of plot their next career step, something must have happened as in like, or was it like a status quo? What happened at that time with those individual contributors? Well, yeah, you can imagine that at, say, annual review time, job review, performance review, whatever you call it in your company. And a manager is looking at the performance history of their employee, you know, service designer Mark, and saying, wow, it looks like you are, you know, and service designer Mark has been doing phenomenal work over the last year, just really, really helping the team contributing in a high level. But the manager is looking at what Mark is supposed to be doing, according to the job architecture and saying, Mark, you didn't meet any of these goals that a UX designer is supposed to be doing. A UX designer is supposed to be making wireframes and doing, you know, documentation on, you know, with our development partners and so on. Why aren't you doing that? Well, Mark would say, of course, I'm a service designer. That's not what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be doing service blueprints and primary research and all of these, you know, important contributions that a service designer does. And the manager will say, oh, well, wait a second. There's a problem here, because I don't even know how to measure you on what you're actually doing. And that was, I mean, I'm fictionalizing a little bit there, but that was actually what was happening. And I and my team were hearing about this over and over that, hey, I've got this great, this great high performing team member. And yet, I can't put them up for a promotion because according to the career framework, they're not doing a great job. So that was just a real realization. And I know that, you know, that's based on my experience at a couple of companies. And I know talking to peers across the industry that that's happening in other places as well. And, you know, we'll get into maybe some of the root causes of that. But, you know, that's not that's not to shame anyone. That's not the fault of anyone for for the condition that the job architecture and career framework is ends up in. It oftentimes is is is the result, for instance, of mergers, you know, where two companies are coming together and two career frameworks are coming together, and they just don't match up. So you've got a service designer who came from from this company, but now they're over in in another company. And their their performance and their job role doesn't doesn't transfer, you know, neatly into that new company. So there's a lot of, you know, in in the in the modern business world, there's a lot of reasons why that why that can happen. And it can just get very complex. I can totally see that this causes a lot of friction, frustration, not being seen, not knowing how to appreciate people for the work that they are doing. Unfortunately, but I think that's maybe also part of an organic growth or mergers. I'm not super familiar with career frameworks and career architectures. Could you impact that a little bit for me, because I can make some assumptions about what it is, I can imagine that there are job descriptions there. But like, what are some of those the key elements that go into a career framework? Sure. Well, the first would be the sort of the, I'll state state, state the obvious, perhaps, but that that there are different levels. And different companies will call this, you know, we'll have different vernacular and vocabulary for this at IBM, for instance, they were called band levels. So, you know, and they were they were numbered so that a designer would come into the company at a band six or a band seven sort of an entry level, they would progress through these band levels, roughly every, you know, two to three, maybe four years, there was a promotion to or the expectation for a promotion to an next band level. So at each of those career levels, there is an articulation of what is expected of a fill in the blank, a service designer, UX designer, design researcher at that level. And in most cases, I'm speaking generally here, the scope of their work gradually but steadily sort of broadens as they progress through that, through that, those career levels. So that a designer starting out might be focused on a very individual project, one project at a time, you know, very sort of narrow focus as they move to the as they move to the next, you know, level, they might be taking on multiple projects. Next level, their leading teams that are working on multiple projects, et cetera, et cetera, to the point where, you know, at the highest levels, they've got a scope that extends across a whole company, perhaps. Again, at each of those levels, we need to state very clearly, what is the expectation of that service designer at that level of their career so that when a manager and a designer are getting together regularly to talk about the performance and to map out their career, they've got a document that can help them with that. It's as simple as that. It can be as simple as that. As you can imagine, these things aren't usually written or crafted or created by designers. They're created by human resources departments and big companies. So they're oftentimes very, not very human centric and not very consumable, you know, and that's problematic. We can discuss that a little later because there's a big opportunity there, obviously. But that's the general idea of what a career framework and a big company might be. Yeah, so a common language, a shared understanding, documented, standardized, agreed upon, something you can point to, a single source of truth. Those are the words that come to my mind. Like you say, not very sexy, but if you don't have it, it's the cause of a lot of frustration. All right. Let me add one thing that, you know, because design and certainly service design are fairly new jobs, it's perhaps important to state that we are grafting, in most cases, grafting design roles onto existing career frameworks. So that's important. I don't think any of us as designers and design leaders would create a career framework the way that it has been created in most big companies if we had it to do from scratch. We don't have it to do from scratch. We almost never do. We're almost always building on an existing framework and an existing framework that's kind of a mess. So that's worth stating that we don't have ideal conditions usually to work with. Yeah. What would we do definitely if we did get the opportunity to start from scratch? Like what are the limitations of the existing frameworks that you've seen? Well, I think that what they don't do well, what I think about is what is the outcome that we are trying to achieve? We're trying to bring value to a company. We are trying to put an employee, a designer in the position where they can be as successful as possible and contribute as much value as possible to that company. And we are trying to create an opportunity for a designer and their manager to have a constructive conversation on a regular basis about how to achieve those things and then how in turn to advance the career of that designer. So that conversation becomes a very important thing. We're trying to facilitate and inspire a positive, constructive, healthy conversation between usually two people, two or three people. And it's very hard. There are some unicorn managers who are able to achieve that from the raw material that they're usually given in a career framework and job architecture. But that's very challenging. And so it's a missed opportunity. A missed opportunity for us to create a really sort of positive exchange. Instead, we end up just hacking our way through a really unfriendly system. And unfriendly in the sense that it becomes primarily used to critique and review and assess rather than open up space and possibilities? Yeah. No, you've got that right. It becomes a kind of a test. It becomes a stick. A stick. That's a great way to frame it. It's almost never is it an inspirational, aspirational set of material. Yeah. And there's the opportunity. So let's jump into the world of HR. What do we need to know as service design professionals about HR? We need to know that an HR department is, they are responsible for all the jobs in an entire company. And so service design and other design practices are not, they're a drop in the bucket. They're a very, a very small, with all due respect, usually a very, not a real significant concern for HR departments. So I always find that the important thing for us to do as design leaders is to become friends with our HR partners. And I laugh at that because it seems very simple, but really that trust and that relationship and getting to understand and empathize with what they are, what those HR teams are charged with, what they're accountable for, what they're trying to achieve, and what they know ultimately is super important. And the stronger you can build those relationships, the more good work you're able to do in that world. So from your experience, how can we help them help us? What do we need to do? Or what have you done? Or when do they start to pay attention? Well, what I've found is, which is that HR professionals, you know, they've got a very difficult job. They're working with a lot of constraints and in a very sort of dense system. And we as designers work in a very different way. And I found that when we can invite HR or HR partners into our world and into our way of working, they love it. And so if we can begin to think about this work, not as the drudgery of working through the dense system of HR and a big company, but as a really interesting service design project, which it is, and we can look at those HR partners as important stakeholders, important users of this system, and we can co-create with them, that changes the whole complexion of the work. And oftentimes, as I said, those HR partners just love to come into our world. And I've found that over and over that back to the relationship and the trust, that becomes a very important way of building that trust with them. And it can be very, very positive. So, you know, I guess the core idea there is don't abandon your superpower of working as a service designer in order to do this work that seems like it's very different from service design. And in this case, I can totally see this as a design challenge that we can absolutely tackle. Have you experienced that HR is able to frame this as a brief? As in, from your experience again, is it a pull request or do we have to nudge them? Or are they in the unknown space? How does this start? I think we have to nudge them and probably nudge them over and over again. Because they, in all likelihood, those HR folks, despite, you know, I'm always assuming best intentions, despite being very good at their jobs, I'm sure, and very committed to the success of the company and the people who work there, they don't understand that, hey, there's a whole new capability and a whole new type of talent and type of worker that is now present and embedded in this company. You know, designers of many different practices who are contributing in a new way, in a very unique way to the success of the company, they likely have a very, if they recognize design broadly at all, I'm certain that they don't understand the nuance differences between a service designer and a UX designer and a design researcher and a design technologist and a UI designer. Those are, you know, they're quite obvious to you and me and the listeners of this podcast, but to that HR professional, almost certainly not very obvious to them. So the message here is that we definitely shouldn't wait for this to happen and be invited into the conversation. We sort of have to invite ourselves into the conversation if we want to create a better environment to be able to do our work better. Yes, if you are listening to this podcast and you are leading a service design team and you don't know your HR partner in the company that you're working in, at the end of this podcast, go on to your company directory and find that person and reach out to them and set up a meeting to get to know them. Bring some donuts. Bring some donuts, bring some coffee and become their friend. So could you share some examples of things that have helped you in actually shaping this because, I don't know, artifacts or processors or tools? Like, what have you set up to make the plumbing work better? Yeah. Well, in my time at IBM, the team that I was leading there created a really awesome designer career playbook, which was, you know, back to the idea of making this material as consumable as possible. That was the brief that we set for ourselves in creating that and we created a very accessible, very consumable, very usable playbook for designers and their managers. And we measured the success of that not on, you know, simply getting it out and publishing it and getting it out into the, you know, on some company intranet, but rather on how frequently it was used. And so that also meant that we needed to get out there and promote it. We needed to train managers on how to use it. There was a whole change management aspect to that project that was as important as the playbook itself. We paid a lot of attention to the tone, to the way that the content was written and the language that we used. So that it was inclusive. It was very positive and upbeat that we avoided many of the that the trappings and the downfalls of typical HR material that you might get on the, you know, you know, as you're working in a big company, that technical language, that dense language, we really, really tried to clarify and create, you know, a resource that was as consumable as possible. And when you say or mention success or impact and how it was used, what changed in practice? Like what stories came back? Well, well, you know, you can look at the growth of, for instance, the lead at IBM and their career framework, the principal level, which is, you know, a very senior individual contributor level. You know, they now have, I don't know the numbers, I haven't been with the company for a couple of years now. But at the time that I left, I think they were up to about 60 principal designers of all practices across the company. When I started there in 2013, there were no principles. So, you know, there's an exponential increase in the level of of those most senior individual contributor designers. So, many of those, most, the vast number of those did not come into the company as principles, right? So they came in at some lower level of that career hierarchy and progressed through, you know, some number of promotions to get to that principal level. So that suggests that there's, you know, that some of the work that we were doing was contributing to that progression. And that's a very positive sign and an important one. And what you see happening, if people progress and get more experienced and take on more leadership roles is, I'm assuming the overall design maturity within the company rises and grows as well. Like your people grow, so does your design maturity? Yeah, exactly. The maturity of your practice, the maturity of your teams, the recognition of design as they practice by other, you know, cross-functional stakeholders in the company, those partners that we're working with every day who are not designers, who, you know, because we're working with them every day, they need to know who we are, what we do, how we do it, why it's important. And that, all of those things are measures and factors of maturity. It's interesting that you mentioned also the partners within the company. In the previous episode, which you haven't heard yet, Neve Parsley from Spotify talks about also like having something tangible to point to creates recognition within the organization, like, hey, this is real. This isn't just something that we've made up or like we can actually point to an official document and a part of the operating system that recognizes the value, the contribution, the fact that something like service design exists or UX design or UX researcher. So did you experience the same thing that it adds to the credibility within the organization? Yeah, and that's a great insight. And another thing that, especially in older companies, I worked at IBM, and IBM is a more than 100 year old company. They have, when I joined in 2013 and when we were originally building the design program there, we were able to learn about the the technical awards that career awards and career recognition for very senior and highly accomplished technical leaders. In their system previously, the idea of being a technical leader meant that you were a software engineer. That was the idea. There was the definition of being a technical leader. Well, what we were able to do was to get design and design in all of its practice areas included as a technical discipline, so that part of it, one of the outcomes that we were reaching for there was that we could get designers included as in these technical awards that are very highly acknowledged and appreciated across the company. So at IBM, the highest level of being a technical leader is being an IBM Fellow. It's very distinguished honor, not only in the company, but across the industry. It's very recognized. They make a big celebration out of it every year when they name their fellows. Well, we were able to get designers into that system so that designers could become IBM Fellows. We're able to get designers as fellows there. I guess the idea there is that most companies have some sort of a very senior career recognition system like that. So go learn about that and see how you can get service design included in that existing system. This is something I'm glad to bring this up because I think people underestimate how powerful it is to actually plug into the existing, again, operating system. I'll give a different example to sort of enrich maybe this story is that if you want to put design on the map, try to get design into meetings. Meetings are things that happen, like, I don't know, how often like 80 percent of an organization is meetings. If you want to get design within the company, get design in meetings. I think what you are sharing as well is there is already a heritage. There is already a system. There is already a structure. It's really challenging to build something next to it and then try to get people to cross the bridge to the other side. It's much easier to start sort of from the inside and leverage what's already there. And what's already understood. And when you're talking back to our earlier point about getting those non-design stakeholders across the company to appreciate design, doing some of these steps that we're talking about now and connecting into existing systems allows them to do that on a familiar framework. They understand that being a distinguished engineer at a company is a very impressive, very highly regarded honor. Well now there's a role called a distinguished designer, a distinguished service designer. Oh, I know what that means. That means that you are the most eminent, most experienced leader in that practice at this company. So I have a high regard for you. That familiarity really can play to our advantage if we can leverage. So this career playbook, I'm butchering the name, but there was a success and using or plugging it into the career labels and having something like a distinguished designer that also works. Some interesting examples of things you tried that didn't work? Well, I think that there are certainly some of the more thorny problems of, for instance, job titling. I mean, as you know, the job titles in the design industry is that they're just so so such a mess. There are just so many and very confusing, especially in those sort of middle career years where a senior designer at a senior service designer at one company might be the equivalent of a lead designer at another company and sometimes there are these very confusing career levels like a designer two or a designer three. Well, what does that mean? I think we've got some real work to do and I know that in both my time at IBM and at Expedia working through those individual tidalings and cleaning up, getting to that level of cleaning up the system, we haven't quite gotten there yet. And partly because changing someone's title to align with an HR system can have real ramifications for that individual designer. If we're saying, hey, you know, you used to be a lead designer, but now you're going to be a senior designer because we needed to clean up the system. You know, that's that. If I'm that designer, and that's the change that's being made to me, that that has real, you know, that that can mean a lot of, you know, hard stuff for me as a designer working my way through my career. So, you know, I think we've got we've got work to do there. I imagine I've seen this in in both of the big companies that I've worked at, you know, in recent years, I I imagine that is that most companies are working through that and struggling with it. And it's going to take us some time. We're still a relatively new, you know, discipline. And so some of these some of these challenges are kind of symptomatic of the relative immaturity of the of the profession right now. While you were sharing this, I was thinking, is it is it immaturity or is it also just part of the DNA of our field as in are we are we pushing against being boxed in and maybe creating no, no, I don't think we're creating sort of a mist to sabotage things. But just like we like freedom, like you can't stick a label on me kind of thing. Have you have you heard that? Have you seen something like that? Oh, sure. I think I think I think you've touched on something very, very, very real about about many designers. I mean, we're we've we've always been the outsider. And we've to I think what you're what you're suggesting perhaps is that we enjoy being the outsider that that's that's where we fit in that's where we feel comfortable. And what what I'm suggesting is that in order to do to to advance our profession, we need to become insiders, in other words, get into these systems and and get get smart about them and work within them. You know, that that may be counterintuitive that may be kind of beyond counterintuitive that might be a you know, I don't know nails on a chalkboard for a designer who's like, I don't want to I don't want to be in a corporate HR system. But when we're talking about scale, when we're talking about an entire profession and many, many companies and we're talking about hundreds, thousands of of of designers. You know, perhaps working within a even a single company, you know, we need to if if we're going to do that in a sustainable way, then we need to we need to be smart about these systems and we need to work within them. Yeah. And the thing you mentioned about scale, that's I think key here because you can probably get away with this in a team of 10, right? In a team of 10, you're still okay. But if you want to grow from 10 to 100, like, you need you need some structure, you need, you need to operationalize, you need to standardize. Otherwise, it's going to be impossible to hire. It's going to be impossible to advance in your career. And and that shift that that you just articulated it that shift from teams, a team of 10 to a team of 100 is exactly what has been happening over the last decade. That that is the that is exactly the the evolution and the progression that we have that we have all seen to to our benefit. Of course, I mean, you know, we've got, you know, we've got more influence than than ever before. And we're doing work in more important ways, I think, than ever before. But, you know, absolutely, we're in a place now where we need to operate more smartly and and and take advantage of these these dense complex systems. I was thinking, we probably don't have to reinvent the wheel here, like we are not the first ones trying to figure out how to standardize roles and how to make this work, even probably not in the design profession. I'm imagining we have huge agencies. They must have frameworks in place. Why aren't we reusing more of this knowledge, which I imagine must be out there. It's a good question. So what I'm hearing you right, there's an there's perhaps an opportunity for us to be sharing, you know, sharing frameworks, sharing materials, sharing our research across organizations and across companies. And, you know, what I found is that companies are very, very sensitive about about HR material. And, you know, I would have loved in my time at IBM with that brilliant designer career playbook that I mentioned, I would have loved to bring that out to the to the industry and say, hey, this is what we did. What are you all working on? But that's just it's there's a lot of sensitivity around that. And it just what makes it sensitive? Is it compensation salaries or? I think so. I think it's the compensation. You know, just there's such a, you know, a confidentiality. Maybe it's intellectual property, but it seems it seems more than that. It seems like the, you know, it's, I'm not an HR professional. So I'm reaching a bit here. But, you know, there are legal concerns. There are compensation concerns. There are concerns about privacy and of, you know, individual, you know, employee performance, you know, material. I wish it wasn't the case because I do I do think there's an opportunity to your point to for all of us to get better if we could share some of this stuff. But it's it's challenging. And I'm in a lucky position not to be part of a huge corporation and not having to deal with these legal and jurisdictional constraints. But nevertheless, if you're listening to this conversation and you do have access to these materials and you're proud of them of what you've developed and you can share them, reach out to me because I think this would be a great way to sort of one, help the community forward. And to also shine a light on your organization and show that you're doing awesome stuff. So I'd be happy to start a, I don't know, a career framework, archive on services and jobs.com. If companies want to share, I'd be curious. And I would challenge companies out there to be to be more open about this. I think that's I think that's a great challenge, a great provocation and prompt. And and even if it's, you know, hey, we can't we can't share the end result, but we can share the story of how we how we worked through the process, even those anecdotes, I've told a few here about my time at IBM and Expedia. But you know, those those are important for us to hear and to share. And, you know, I think there's probably some wisdom we can, we can gain from each other by by being a little bit more open about just the process of working through all of this. I need a few more hosts on the show. There are so many topics that I would like love to explore. There's just so much still to uncover. So that's another call to action if you if you are for being a host on a podcast, and reach out to me, maybe we can do something together. Sort of heading towards the end of our chat here, Doug, I'm curious if you reflect back on your past five years, because that's how long it's been since you've been on the show. What is maybe the thing you wish you would have known about this topic of careers, career frameworks, HR? I wish we would have been. You know, again, I was at IBM for over eight years. I think we we weren't, we weren't sharp enough early enough there in my time. And I take this on myself. I'm not, you know, pointing the finger at the company or anything. But it took us several years to really discover what a what a problem we had on our hands and a few more years to work out the solutions to it. And so we lost some time there. You know, I wish we were more more on the front foot, as opposed to, you know, discovering that we had a real crisis, but a real, you know, a real problem on our hands that, you know, when you're when you're when you're in that mode, you're more reactionary, you're more, you know, you're chasing, you're chasing it, as opposed to, you know, leaning into it. And I don't think we we had the chance to do that, which is why, you know, I my my core advice to those listeners is, is if if if you're in a role where you're at that earlier point in the trajectory and the evolution of service design within your company, get lean into it, get get ahead of it, get, you know, do that, do that discovery, that internal discovery as soon as possible and understand what you're working with. It feels like this is one of those pieces of the puzzle that when you're still small, you don't miss it. Like you can you can hack your way around these things. But the moment you sort of start reaching again, going for skill, everything comes crumbling down and you sort of see that you don't have a good foundation to scale up on. And this is one of those things that's really hard to find the time and invest in at the start, because it's not needed at the start. It feels like, like, why should we put time and effort into this? We can hack our way around. We're going, we're going at a frantic pace. We're doing awesome stuff. Why should we bother about something like a career framework? You know, such an opportunity here. And again, just to come back to the possibility or the opportunity for us to always to be, to approach these problems as design problems rather than as, you know, corporate HR problems. That's, that's, that's what I, what I really hope you know, we, we seize partly because we can really inspire our partners in these HR organizations to, to be more human centered, to work with a more, you know, work in a more design driven way. And that is good for companies. That is, that is, that is something that we can bring that is beyond our individual impact. That, that is a way, that is impacting the way a company works and, and the culture of a company. So I, I hope we hang on to that idea too. If I'm going to try something new, if you could leave us with a question, something to ponder upon, something to reflect upon after this conversation, what do you think would be a helpful, valuable, meaningful question? Well, I mean, we're always working in, in how might we, that's our, that's one of our signature moves, you know, as designers. Yeah, that's one of our, so how, you know, how might we ensure that, that service design career paths are clearly defined and embedded in a company's HR systems so that the designers can be as successful as they can and have great careers and can contribute to the, the success of a company. That's, that's the question that I would ask and the hope that I would have for, for us as we move into the next five years, Mark, as we, as we think about our, our, our, our podcast five years from now, you know, I hope we're seeing that we've got service designers in very, who have, who have been able to progress through their careers at, at companies to very senior levels and that we're seeing more, you know, executive level service design leaders in, you know, companies across the industry, across the, across the world, really. I'm hopeful. Based on what I'm seeing industry, I'm very hopeful. But as what always with these things is, if we can do anything to accelerate it, that's just going to benefit everybody. So on that note, I want to thank you, Doug, for coming back on sharing this and sharing this question with the community. Always helpful, always insightful. Thank you for being open. And I'm curious where your journey will take you in the next months and years. I am too. Thank you. Thank you again for inviting me, Mark. It's always great to spend time with you and look forward to connecting down the line and doing this again sometime. Completing the trilogy. Thanks, Doug. All right. Thanks, Mark. Okay. So on a scale from one to five, how well is design represented in your company's career framework? Leave a comment down below and let us know. I want to thank Doug once again for coming on and sharing his experience with us. I really hope that you enjoyed it and learned something new. I've been sharing conversations with industry legends like Doug here on this channel for over six years now. And I don't plan to stop anytime soon. So if you don't want to miss any of the future conversations, make sure you subscribe to the channel. My name is Mark Fontaine. I want to thank you for spending a part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor. Keep making a positive impact. And I hope to see you soon in the next video.