 One of the big challenges for every service designer is getting buy-in from senior leadership. So what do CEOs and business leaders need to know about design to appreciate its value? That's what we're going to explore in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Audrey and this is the service design show, episode number 93. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is Audrey Crane. As a partner at DesignMap, Audrey has first-hand experience that not everybody in the world or gets the value of design right away. So in this episode, we're going to build our business fluency a little bit further and also talk about the recent book Audrey wrote called What CEOs Need to Know About Design. So at the end of this episode, you'll know how to better communicate the value of design so we can get more buy-in from senior leadership and do the work you love. If you enjoy conversations like this, don't forget that we bring a new video on the channel at least once a week that will help to level up your service design skills. If you don't want to miss any of that, click that subscribe button and that bell icon so you'll be notified when new episodes come out. That's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Audrey. Welcome to the show, Audrey. Thank you so much Mark, I'm glad to be here. I'm really glad to have you on the show as the new book is out which will be talking about a lot in this episode but for the people who don't know who you are, could you give like a brief introduction? Yeah, so my name is Audrey Crane. I'm a partner at a design firm called Design Met. We're based in San Francisco and we do design strategy and digital product design mostly focused on enterprise and B2B products. And you're also an author? I am. You can call yourself that way. I just checked your LinkedIn profile and it's prominently on there. Is it? It is. Our great marketing team must have got their hands on my LinkedIn profile. It looks good. I still can't believe it. I was talking to my friend Jeff Patton and I said, you know, this has been so hard. I don't even care if anybody buys it or reads it. And Jeff said, that's how you know you're a real author. I do care. That's not true. Yeah, so the book is what CEOs need to know about design, a business leaders guide to working with designers. And it's published with Sense and Respond Press who does these great little practical books. All the links will be in the show notes. So if people are interested in the book, links down below. And we'll be giving away a signed copy, but more on that at the end of the episode. Audrey, I haven't prepared you for this question, but you're on the service design show. What is your first memory of service design? Do you recall hearing that term somewhere? Yeah, so I think probably like many people that go way back on the internet, and especially in Silicon Valley, adaptive path was, I think the first time that I heard about it. And I'm sure, I know there was a conference as well that was kind of funny because it was a design conference and all the designers were sort of, this was probably the late 90s, were kind of trying to explain what their practice was. So there were lots of information architects and interaction and interface design. I think Cooper had for Don Norman had coined those terms. And every, each presentation had sort of a circle in the middle and then other just like research or whatever. And then it just depended on the speaker, like what the title was. What was in the middle? Yeah, exactly. So I think I also heard about service design there and it was one of those kind of Nelson clock-looking diagrams. Funny. Yeah, I can imagine. And it's probably familiar to a lot of people who are listening that you're sort of always the epicenter of the rest of the universe. Of course, yeah. Yeah, but I, you know, it's funny that I think the second place I heard it was a designer trying to insist to me that we didn't do service design, doing digital product design that was very B2B focused. And he's like, we don't do service design. This isn't what we do. But the question was sort of inevitable. Like, okay, well, people are going to use this tool, but where are they coming from? Oh, well, they were talking to this other team and they got this output that was the input into this tool. Okay, well, how did that go and how do they know and what format is it in? And so it's sort of a natural extension of what people do when they do digital software design if they're asking those questions. Exactly. Yeah, I think, well, this might get a little bit philosophical, but I think everybody is already doing service design whether they know it or not. Like, you cannot be not doing service design if you're basically in any business these days. But the question is, are you doing it consciously? Yes, I feel like you read my book already. The very beginning of it is kind of addressing this idea that design doesn't exist somehow because it's a B2B tool, so there's no design. And the question is just whether you're using it to your advantage or not. Okay, without giving too many spoilers, let's rather jump into the topics you shared with me. The question, I ask everybody, are you ready to start doing some interview jazz? I am. I have your topics over here. And the first one, and of course, all going to relate to the topic of the book, the first one is going to be leverage design, how coincidentally, and do you have a question starter? I do. I'm glad we didn't totally give that away. So my question starter is, how can we help more organizations leverage design effectively? So I think that we live, and I was just watching your video cast with Jorge, who's a friend, and I feel very lucky to call him a friend. He's brilliant. He's teaching at CCA, and really any time you're having, sometimes he's in our office even, and I'm getting a cup of coffee, and in a three-minute conversation, we're already at some PhD level that we can probably even keep up with, where Jorge has read everything and his extraordinary book. We have this bubble where we're having, as the design practice advances, we're having more and more and more effective advanced conversations about design. And my perception is that we're creating a gap, and there's a schism between us and our design conferences and these advanced conversations, and people who, her design is important, but don't know where to start, or think they don't have design, but the, I can't remember who said it, the alternative to good design isn't no design, it's bad design. Something is there. And so, in my world as a consultant, I, it was just a few weeks ago that I was talking to an engineering manager, and I said, of all the products that you guys build, it was a financial services, B2B financial services. All the products you guys build, what percentage of those are designers working on the teams? And it's kind of an obvious leading question, right? There's a clear right answer to that question. And what he said very honestly was, I mean, I think about 60% of the teams who build products that customers see, or that our employees use, that have some kind of grapple, have designers working on it. 40% no designers. So maybe a better question is sort of like back to how can we, how can we close this gap so that these companies who don't know how to hire designers, don't know what a wireframe is, don't know how to use a designer once they've hired them. How can we close that gap so that they can like design effectively? Right. There is a question in my mind that relates to this and I'm sure there must have been a point in your career where you thought, I need to write a book about this, like closing this gap. What do you recall a moment, a tipping point where you thought I need to, we need to wake up, we need to close this? And yeah. Yeah, there was one actually. So a CEO was referred to design app. He was the CEO of a, it's a sales tool and two or 300 employees and he said, look, I was an engineer. I understand technology. I've learned as I've been promoted through the years about HR and marketing and finance and operations. I understand those. I know that design is important, but I don't know how to use it or how to learn about it. Can you help me? And that I was sort of gobsmacked by the obviousness of the question and the fact that nobody had ever asked us that before. And like, what do I do? Do I, he doesn't want to learn Photoshop or sketch, right? Handing him the design of everyday things or about face is not going to answer his question. There's no place I could point him. And so that was the kind of the spark for this book. And since then it's just gotten reinforced over and over again where smart people with successful businesses are reading, you know, analyst reports and want to do something, but they don't know how. There's not a good gateway in for them. There's no way in. There's no way in. And it's reinforced over and over again when I was just at a company a few months ago and they heard the, they heard design is important. I won't tell you what they do because I think you'd be able to figure out what company it is, but they have one designer. And this is a common mistake, right? You got one designer, you're like, could you do our logo and our letterhead and our marketing sites and the service design and the product design itself? Both visual interaction, you look like you don't know what you're doing if you post a job, posting that. And then if a designer takes that job, that's a good indicator that you guys are way in trouble. So they had done that. This was women's first job out of college. And they said, Audrey, we'd like you to look at some design work and give this woman some feedback. I said, okay, sure. And I was visiting, they brought me into a conference room with eight people, including the designer. And they asked her to open sketch, but she did. And there's a screen with their four logos on it. And there were 20 more or something. And I am sure you can appreciate, Mark. I was horrified. And I said, this isn't how we do critiques with eight business analysts in the room, first of all. But second of all, who is the screen for? Why do they need this? Who's using this product? What are they going to do with it? And she didn't know that it was her job to ask these questions. They didn't know that it was her job to ask these questions. Everybody thought that it was their job to tell her what screen to design and her job to make it pretty. Right. A very superficial understanding of design. Maybe we'll get to this, but if not, let me ask you this question right now is without getting into the how for, because that's like super tempting. How do we explain this? Or how do you, what is the one or two most important questions that we should be asking ourselves as a design community to figure it us out? To help to close this gap? Well, I think one is why aren't we trying harder to fix this? Why isn't anybody trying to solve this problem? I think it's fun for designers to talk to designers about design enough and we're all enjoying learning and getting better at our practice, but I don't know anybody to do this. I think it'd be very interesting to say of all the companies in the world designing digital products or anything, designing anything to that point of service design, how many of them have a designer on staff? And why aren't we trying to quantify that? And why aren't we trying to fix it? Why aren't we trying to reach those people in a meaningful way? What's so compelling about sort of walling ourselves off? That's a good question for the community. And it also makes me think again, when I created the first course here for the service design show, it's called Selling Service Design with Confidence. If clients don't give you the opportunity to do good, proper design work, then it's no use. And I sometimes have the feeling that the problem is so much in our face, it's so close that we're sort of not seeing it. We're seeing straight through it while it's right in front of us. I don't know. Yeah, I mean anybody who uses any especially B2B tool knows that it's a problem. Like it's a problem that exists. And yeah, we sort of go into this like silent subset of rarefied design and just live there. Well, I think this would be a good transition into topic number two. Let's give it a shot, see what happens. And this one is called Common Mistakes. Common Mistakes. I would say how many? How many? Let's see. Maybe wait, we can use what if. What if we could what if we could reach these people that you and I were talking about in these big organizations with kind of crappy design happening? What if we could reach out to them? And help them solve the most common mistakes or maybe the most impactful mistakes? Like what would those mistakes be and what kind of impact would we have if we could solve for those? Yeah, so I guess the underlying question we also need to ask here is what kind of common mistakes do you see? Yeah, yes. And I mean, I think we gave it a sneak peek to that. We already talked about one, which was the kind of trying to hire a unicorn thing. And I don't know if you've heard this title is being used more product designer. It's a title that I again, because I guess every winter we need to argue about what design titles are. But product designer I've heard it's described to me three different ways. It's like a fun party question. Like what is a product designer? But one person described it to me as someone who does in digital product design both interaction and visual. And I wouldn't be shocked if they said and service design. So even is a title for a unicorn that's not unicorn. So anyway, I think that we covered one, which is trying to hire a unicorn or hiring just one designer. And they sort of like sit in a corner. And I cannot tell you how many designers we've hired because they were so tired of being the only designer on staff. Lonely, yeah, desperate. And if you get stuck, you're kind of stuck. You're alone and you're kind of do everything and nothing is happening. And often when there's that little resource available, it depends a little bit on how much software is being produced. But there's no uplift. So their work isn't getting seen. Sometimes the work isn't getting used even. I met a designer who told me a story of he was walking by a room, a bunch of QA and engineers were in there. And they were like, hey, Joe, I can't, that wasn't his name. But Joe, Joe, can you come in here and look at the screen? So 12 people are arguing about, you know, whether something should be a pull down menu or radio buttons. Engineers and QA people are arguing about this. And they want his opinion as the sole designer on staff, another about 200 person from. And he said, do the design that I made for this screen not work? This is very different. And they said, you designed the screen? We didn't even know that you did. So, so you can imagine just kind of having one person sort of spitting out what little coverage they can do across all this stuff. It doesn't get doesn't have that uplift. And it doesn't get used in the same way. I would say also giving good feedback. I mean, what if all CEOs and really business leaders writ large gave useful or productive feedback? Imagine how different feedback sessions would be. How far can we expect or should we expect of business leaders to become fluent in the design language? I don't think we should write. Yeah, so. And it's yeah, I see the face you're making. And I agree with you. It's it's interesting to me that we so often we offer clients. We have some workshops and we say, these are kind of ready to go. So if you guys want to do a workshop with us, we can do them. And and one of the options we give them is giving feedback. And I'm shocked at how often the giving feedback one is chosen. As I think, well, just like for you guys, isn't it just like saying your opinion? But I think they're nervous about it because there's some suggestion that you should be fluent in the language of design or have some level of expertise in design. And then you're in a you're the leader, you're the ranking person in the room with a group of people supposed to be doing what? Like showing some expertise when you don't have it. But it's not your job to have it anymore than it's your job to be a great developer. Right. And so what what I asked for from business leaders is that they focus on their intent, their intended outcome. And that they ask questions about how it supports that intent. So that's kind of like the main core of it. And then the important hygiene is to start with the question, what are you looking for from this meeting? And I'm sure you do. I teach designers when you get in a room, you say, OK, I'm just looking for if people can actually do this with that, if it makes sense. I don't care about color. I don't care about typos. And to always start with that, it could be 10 seconds, five seconds. But a lot of times designers skip it. They kind of jump right into the thing. And then what happens is a business leader says there's a typo because that's something I can obviously add value. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an expertise I have. And then the designers like looks defensive, right? Oh, no, no, no. We don't care about typos right now. And then the business leader kind of looks like a jerk because he or she didn't know that that's not the kind of feedback we were looking for. And it's it's very hard to really have a great feedback meeting. So, so, you know, I would say the good hygiene and then helping us remember to stay on track with our intended outcome. And you could have a great feedback meeting with the business leader doing nothing that asking questions. Yeah. And though that was my question that just arose while you were explaining this, I can imagine that it's not about business leaders becoming fluent in design. Maybe it's the design community becoming better at asking business related questions. Yeah. Getting the, is it? Yeah, I think for sure. Yeah, the business, the design community getting more business minded. I don't I don't think we're that bad at this anymore. But there was a time when designers were we had to fight so hard for a seat at the table or to be heard or that it was almost, we almost lost sight of the point and it was like design for design sake. But the fun thing about design is that it's bounded problem solving, right? The boundaries are what makes it fun and interesting to me at least. And so the business context creates those boundaries in which we operate. And so it's really only just in the last five years that educators like CCA has an MBA program and that they're really starting to speak business with designers, which I wish we had been doing in the first place because it's such a critical part of being effective at solving the problem. If you don't know what the problem is, how are you solving it? Wow. But I completely agree that designers being more business-minded, business leaders being more design-minded can really create a dialogue that's really effective. Let's, no, one more question about this because this was about common mistakes. Have you seen a change or something that you said or that you do where it starts to click for business leaders? Is there something that somehow creates an aha moment? I have seen that. I tell them, what if you use the Socratic method of giving feedback to kind of restate what I already said? And Socrates wasn't stupid or wasn't lacking an expertise. So just asking questions and I asked them to do this. They say, just go into your next feedback meeting and just does an experiment. Just try it. Just ask questions and see what happens. And they come out smiling and the designers come out smiling. Yeah. Yeah, that's super powerful, right? Something simple to prototype to experiment. And going through the experience is probably what creates the aha moment. For sure. I could talk to them blue in their face, but until one tries it out, it's impossible for it to really click. I think. I haven't read your book, so I can't comment on that, but I can imagine that for a lot of people outside of the design community, and then we go to really get design, they have to experience it rather than we see or hear it. And it's quite experiential. Yes. It's funny you say that. You remind me of a client of ours who's a really successful. They had a great exit. He sold, it was exact target, and they were acquired by Salesforce for like $2.5 billion. So the CEO of that company said, of working with DesignMap, I think this is a good analogy. He said, working with DesignMap is like buying your first $300 pair of jeans. You're like, what? That's crazy. But once you do it, you're never going back. You're never buying jeans that will maybe again. Yeah, go ahead. It's about the investment, so that does stand out, but it's about the experience of it. And it's impossible until you experience it in some way. Yeah, so the challenge on us is to create enough confidence for people to make the leap with us. That's one of the major jobs we have. Sorry, you strapped right to me. Yeah, I was saying our job is to give, somehow upfront, the confidence for people to do this, even though they haven't experienced it. Like it's making the bungee jump for the first time. How do you know that the rope will... Well, yeah, it won't break. Yeah. We're as an industry becoming experts at creating little, tiny experiments, right? Exactly. Well, tiny little experiences. Topic number three will be about maybe that. Tiny little experiences where the magic wand. That's topic number. Great, I already used up what if. You can reuse them. I do like this one. What if... My what if is about... Yeah, so what if I could wave a magic wand and solve and change one thing about business leaders, writ large? So I think that business leaders have caught the religion of talking to users or customers. At least they've all heard that they're supposed to do it. And I think a lot, a lot, a lot of them are doing it. The thing about business leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, founders, product managers is that they are usually super charismatic, right? A product manager isn't usually the boss of anybody. So they're evangelizing. People are excited to work on this thing. If they're doing their job well, engineers and designers and customers and executives or site. And they take that charisma and especially if they're startup founders, they're pitching all the time. They take that good-looking, charismatic, fabulousness out in the world. And they talk to customers or potential customers. And what they find out is that they are super charismatic. They may or may not be learning anything about what they're trying to learn about. And so if I could wave a magic wand, I would teach them to take that hat off and put on the hat of, I won't say a researcher, but someone without a horse in the race. So the analogy that I use, and this is another thing that clicks with them and it's exciting to talk to them about, is there's a woman named Beatrice Ward who wrote an essay on typography called The Crystal Goblets. And she says, she imagines a bottle of wine. And there's two glasses. There's this gold and jewel encrusted, like substantial thing. And then there's just a wine glass. And which glass you might choose, Mark, to drink the wine from tells me if you're interested in experiencing the glass or the wine. With Crystal Goblet is designed to be present as little as possible, but just to present the contents as clearly, but literally and figuratively as it possibly can. And so she makes an analogy to typography that when you're reading a book, if a typographer has done their job well, you don't notice the typography, right? It conveys the content as well as it can possibly be conveyed and gets out of the way. And nobody's impressed except for other typographers because they don't notice it. So you could apply this analogy, I think, to technology as a whole, but I apply this analogy to talking to users. So my job when I'm talking to users is to be a Crystal Goblet, to be there as little as possible and to just make space for the other person to fill. And there's lots of techniques for doing good research. Steve, I know, is on the show and just not being silent is a way to make space. Asking questions that don't have an end. So was this experience, and people getting comfortable and they want to say something in that space, but I would say 80% of good research practice can kind of fit into the auspices of this analogy. And when I explain that to people and I say, don't pitch, don't chuddy at them excited because you're going to have a garbage in, garbage out problem. If you're not really learning anything from them about how much they like you. And they, what's hard is that people who aren't really self-aware don't know that they're not great at talking to users. But so the people who are the least good at it are the least aware that they're the least good at it. It's kind of the Denning Krueger thing maybe. But I have seen entrepreneurs and product managers go, oh, that's a completely different way of thinking about it. And I've done some exercises that I have them go through sometimes, but even without that, this just like goes off in their head. And what if instead of coming back and saying, huge success, they love it, I'm brilliant. They love me. What if they came back and said, these are the things that they liked. These are the things we learned. Right. These are the things that we need to address. How many products would be 100 times better in the world? I'm sort of recognizing a theme throughout this episode with the things you're sharing and that is asking better questions. In a lot of situations, it's about asking better questions. And those lead to a lot of good things, right? And in this case, getting out of the way and asking the good, well, better questions. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't think of that, but I completely agree with you. It's sort of not knowing the right answers but asking better questions. And what's so nice about designers is that they got trained by being criticized for years. And so their ego gets out of the way, right? There's me and there's that thing. And they're not the same. And so if your ego is out of the way, you don't need to know all the right answers. You don't need to be proven right. And that's quite interesting because I think maybe that I hope that is changing. But of course, there has been a group of designers that is still educated in the way that they have to be the expert and they have to know. I don't think they are watching the show, probably. But there is still that tendency of the designer as the expert, the creator, the hero. And I think that's also stuck with, that might still be the public image of a designer in whatever sense of form. Yeah. The kind of diva thing. Well, yeah. The people who create the artifacts that we see at the design shows. Yeah. That's... I mean, to be honest, I do expect expertise from my designers sorry, something made a noise. A reality. Yeah. My mentor was Hugh Deverly, who studied at Yale. And believe me, I know what the appropriate line length is. And I was there at two o'clock in the morning trying to make sure that stuff lined up. There is a... We know about the readability of all caps versus candle case versus lower case. And there is some expertise that I do expect that should just show up. But I think what we are becoming experts at is learning what we don't know. So, yes, you have all this stuff and you better know it. And I expect you to be good at it. I want bullets hanging. But also I expect an expertise in how to learn. Effective and efficiently with a minimum of investment and maximizing our confidence that we actually learned something and we understand what it means. And then that kind of ideating to solve that. So, it's... I mean, I think it's... True expertise doesn't require outside reinforcement kind of thing, you know? I agree. I agree. We're heading towards the end of this chat, but not before we've done two really important things. And the first one is I want to give you the opportunity to ask the community a question. Is there something you'd like us to think about? Yeah. Asking better questions. Let's put it in practice. Yeah, yeah. And I think we kind of started with the sort of how might we reach outside of our bubbles of conversation in which are productive and useful and we should keep having them, but reach out to companies that have zero designer on staff that have engineers, business analysts, product managers, project managers doing design. How might we reach them and help make their jobs easier, more fun, their output better and the outcome better for their companies and their customers? Because I think that's a great question. I don't know how to do that, to be honest. Well, yeah. Well, it's up to the people who are listening and watching to come up with answers. It's up to us to ask the questions in this case. The other question that I have for you is if people want to read your book, I'll put the links down below, but we're also going to give one, we're going to do a contest, a giveaway contest, and not just any giveaway contest, a signed copy, but people have to do something. How do we, how can people compete? How can we win a book? Yeah. I'm super excited about this. I want to ask, I get to ask the questions. Again. My favorite thing. Yeah, so I shared a couple of stories about companies that weren't leveraging design or didn't know about design. One was the CEO calling and saying, what do I do? And the other, another one was the engineering manager saying 40% of our products go out with no designer and staff. And then I shared the third one about the designer with the four logos. So I think it would be really fun to have a contest for folks to share their own stories of organizations that they saw or worked in that weren't aware of what's possible with design or maybe weren't aware of design at all. And I would like to read those stories and then we'll say the best story from the trenches like that we'll send a copy of the book to. Stories from the trenches. A signed copy of the book. Can you show it up again? And so that people know what CEOs need to know about design. Yes. All right. Audrey, when people want to reach out to you, email LinkedIn, Twitter, what's the best way to? It's all good. I'm odd crane, A-U-D-C-R-A-N-E on Twitter and or LinkedIn is fine, but probably what's easiest is Audrey at designmap.com. That's with an M and not an N. Not design maps, but design map. All right. Thanks so much for sharing. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for putting in the effort over the last two years. We owe you a big time as a community. Thank you so much, Mark. It was a pleasure. It was super fun to be on. So what is your biggest takeaway from this episode with Audrey? Leave your comments down below. Also, if you have any questions based on what we've discussed, we'd love to hear them. Leave your comments again down below. And if you know somebody who might be interested in what we've just discussed, make sure to grab the link and share this episode with them. That way, you'll also help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more inspiring guests like Audrey. We're going to continue in this next video over here. So if you want to stick around and level up your service design skills, click over here and I'll see you over there.