 Hi, I'm Patricia. Welcome to the Service Design Show Episode 196. Hey there, brave change agent! Welcome back again to the Service Design Show, the show where we invite the brightest minds in our field to uncover what's truly needed to design great services that resonate with people, push our businesses forward and honor our planet. I'm your host Marc Fontaine. Our guest today, Patricia Bertini, is on a mission. A mission to re-establish design as a strategic discipline within companies. After pursuing a PhD at the London School of Economics, Patricia saw a big blind spot in our community that's preventing us from doing more good. In the recent years, we haven't done a great job at connecting the dots between our work and the impact it has on the metrics our organizations care about. Therefore, design has been pushed into a corner where its voice has been even further marginalized. The way to reverse this downward spiral, according to Patricia, is by starting to measure the impact of design and define metrics that matter. Easier said than done. Well, the good news for us is that Patricia has been developing and implementing measurement frameworks inside organizations for years with success. So, in today's conversation, you're going to learn about why design has been declining while product has been on the rise in the recent years. What the dots are that we haven't been connecting, how we can translate the value that we bring into tangible business outcomes, how to measure impact when you're working on a systemic level and what it means to put measurement frameworks in place. Patricia shares many interesting things with us, but if anything, make sure you pay close attention to the part of our conversation where we talk about the difficulty of measuring impact when you're not involved with delivery, as is often the case with service design, of course. And the suggestions Patricia has as how we can get around this challenge. So, I invite you to join me for the conversation and I'll catch you at the end of the chat for my personal reflections. Let the show begin. Welcome to the show, Patricia. Hi, Marc. Thank you for having me. Awesome to have you on. We're going to explore a topic that I feel has been a pattern, a trend, definitely maybe even beyond a weak signal, becoming a strong signal on the show. But before we do that, we do a proper introduction. For the people who don't know who you are, haven't looked into your background, Kifu, could you give us a brief introduction on what you do these days and who you are? So, I'm Pat. I head up the design operations practice at 8x8, which is a U.S. telco specializing in contact center by telephony. And I've been focusing on design operations and enabling people, creating efficiencies for people and companies for the past, well, I would say officially 10 years, but probably it's been something I've always been really passionate about, what's best than helping people to do the best job of their life and creating value for the customers, the users, your team and the business. Amazing. Thank you for that intro. The question that I also always ask is, do you recall the first moment you heard about service design? Service design as a discipline. Oh, that was a long time ago. Because, you know, it's design is not just pixels. It's not just copy. It's the experience. It's about making sure we know how things flow in and out, applications, products and experiences. So, I can't really recall the first time I'm trying to think, but I would say 15 years ago, cheaper take. I'm trying to think where I was working at that time. It was perhaps in consultancy. So, yes. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. For me, it was also about 15 years ago, something like that. Patricia, we have a rapid fire lightning question around to get to know you a little bit better next to, as a person next to the professional, I'm going to give you five sentences, which you need to finish as quickly and as easily as possible. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. I'm ready. All right. Let's do this. The first sentence you have to finish is the best part of my day is when I am designing processes and seeing people working smart, not hard. All right. Next one, the best or the most important quality in a friend is trust and honesty. Trust and honesty. All right. Next one, a lesson that I learned the hard way was to trust and to accept the critics. You're doing well. Fourth one, I've always wondered why. Why things are not easier and we overthink and complicate things. All right. And the fifth and final one, our world needs more lightheartedness and smiles. All right. Let's try to implement that in this conversation, Patricia. The main topic of our conversation today is design identity and bringing design back as a strategic discipline. You have some thoughts and opinions about that. Could you tell us a little bit more? Yes. I mean, if we look at what has been happening in the past, I would say three years after pandemic, we had a huge rush into increasing digital products and digital experiences. The world was pandemic or since the pandemic really went very, very fast into everything is digital. We have more products, more experiences, but somehow what happened is that all this digital focus on digital products was not driven by design. Somehow, if you think back what has happened since the 2007, 2008, when Tim Brown and Roger Martin wrote the books and the paper on design thinking, we had the first phase when we had everyone rushing to implement design thinking and design becoming a strategic discipline that was delivering value to the business and the customer. So if you think about John Meadah who created the design in tech, design in business reports, because everyone was, hey, we need a design company. We needed to implement design. It was wonderful. Design was thriving. Then somehow things didn't go well. What happened was suddenly design has been moving from it's a strategic discipline. It's something that brings value, that brings the user at the heart of the organization, that it's implementing experiences and products that keep the customer in mind into design from strategy to cost center. And we have seen products, product organization growing into a more leadership role and design kind of moving back into a more, hey, we execute pixels. We suggest we do what product tells us something has been lost in this transition. And this is why it's time that we start acknowledging this and looking at things. Hey, let's face the elephant in the room. We are not leading as much as we could as designers and design leaders. We are not leading as much as we could. I think a lot of people who are listening to this will agree. How did you come to this inside conclusion? What have you experienced that made you go, hmm, maybe we're not in the position that we wish to be or that we could be in order to create most value? Yeah, I mean, there are different signs. If you look at the market, at the job market, you will start looking at way more CPO and product leader roles compared to CDLs. Even if you just simply do a very simple search on LinkedIn and you compare how many chief design officers versus product chief officer CPOs are, you will start seeing that somehow that's not even, that's not balanced. And then you start looking at the jobs and the market. And then you start also exploring and looking at what organizations are doing and talking to your colleagues and your peers. And you just start realizing that design doesn't have the seed anymore that it could have and that the product organization is just driving. So probably some listeners will realize that they're executing or the input that a designer or a design leader can have in a roadmap, it's marginal. So while in an ideal state, we should have two streams to a product. One is user-driven innovation, which is led by design because we look at the market, we look at the user, we try to identify the unmet needs and we start to create hypotheses to test what we want. And the other one is coming from the product organization, looking at what competitors are doing, where the market is going. Now, I wouldn't say this should be 50-50, but what is the percentage? That's a question that everyone can answer themselves and realize that how much is design contributed to the product strategy and the product delivery today? Interesting. So let's maybe try to do a lesson in history here. If we go back, like you said, the book by Tim Brown, Change, Bind Design and Roger Martin was designing business, I think, something like that. What has happened since the release of those publications and the sort of first wave of design getting seen as a strategic discipline to where we are today and where we've seen a decline of design as a strategic discipline and the rise of product? It's a lot to summarize, but can you give us the highlights of the last 15 years? Absolutely. And I'm sharing my personal view, so it's not a universal. That's what we want here on the show. Exactly. So there are a couple of things that happened, I think. The first one is, I think design thinking has been crystallized and not evolved enough. If you think about what was the big revolution of design thinking was bringing the user at the heart of the product definition using the user and understanding, creating empathy to understand what are the opportunities. So design thinking is about problem solving. So you start with empathy, understanding what the user needs, what are the behaviors, observing, of course, not asking the user what do you want. We know they're either true or not a fourth quote about horses. So there was a big revolution for the first time. It was not the CEO or someone within the organization deciding this is the product we want. We were listening to the user to develop it. But then suddenly something didn't grow in this discipline because what I find that it's missing in a lot of design teams is the data-driven approach. So I don't know if it ever happened to you where you have the designers going with all the empathy in these big product meetings and suddenly there is a PM or a product director saying, oh, we need to rethink this part of the journey. And you start having a clash because you will have probably the designer saying, hey, but our persona or our interviews or our study but we learn what actually user really like. I mean, Tom, our persona really loved that part of the journey because design never really implemented the quantitative behavioral element of design. How many designers are using behavioral analytics as part of their decision-making approach? Generally, you will have product organization leading with amplitude, mixed panel, behavioral data from the product and designers being more or less oblivious or very less with minimal confidence in that. And that's really kind of created a shift. I mean, I keep saying we should be moving from T-shaped designers into Pi-shaped designers. T-shaped is someone that is driven by the execution, by empathy, by delivering for the product organization into a Pi-shaped where you have empathy plus data, plus behavioral data, where you have partnership with product because design can bring in empathy and data together rather than having this clash. And the second element is we have seen a very rapid growth in the design organizations as I was mentioning, especially since the pandemic. So everyone was pushing, pushing design. And in 2020, there were a lot of massive growth in the design and digital organization, which was often pushed with internal resources. So rather than going and chasing a mature, well-formed, high-level thinker design strategies or leader, a lot of organizations started over-promoting their internal resources, missing out on cross-contamination, missing out on bringing in different ways of thinking and kind of iterating with internal resources that not always had the capacity, the maturity to step up. And this has created a little bit, these two elements, the fact that we are not implementing data-driven design at scale, and that we have a leadership that has mixed experiences, you can have some fantastic leaders, but some leaders are not always ready for the task at hand. So let's try to unpack this together and let's start with your first observation that design is not as data-driven as it could be, right? That's what you're saying. Now, we might be listening to this and thinking to ourselves, well, hold on, Patricia. We have a lot of data. We have a lot of qualitative data, stories are data. We talk to our users. Are we disregarding that kind of data? No, we are not. It's about triangulation. As researchers will know, you can't rely on one type of data. When you want to have confidence, when you want to make the right decision, you need to be informed by different approaches and different ways of looking at the same problem. So if we keep just relying on qualitative data, if you just keep relying on one type of data, one family data, you are missing out on a perspective that can challenge or bring new questions because from the behavioral data, you will learn, hey, why suddenly the error rate in this part of the journey has increased? What happened? Or why people are not progressing after that path? So you can't have this in the qualitative because you need to be very, very lucky to get a decent sample in your qualitative sample that experiences the same problem. But if you look at behavioral data, you will be able to see that there's something happening there. And you need to have that perspective to frame better questions and to frame better ways of looking at the reality and to create new questions because design should not just answer questions. It should create questions, look at the reality, to see what can we do for the customers and not what the customer wants or what the competitors are doing. Let's look at the experience. So it's about enriching and having more data sources helps to have more influence and also a stronger voice to the table. I'm curious, do you have an example or story where you've seen that when we had this additional data source design had a stronger voice? Yes, it happens all the time. The moment that you start applying this, you will start asking the right questions. So in the past, we had an issue with accounting software with the submission. And we had the team just doing interviews. Why? There are some delays in the people are not submitting. We were seeing this in the analytics, right? In the analytics, we would see that the time to complete a submission for tax purposes was getting longer and people were not completing. Yet when you interviewed them, they were saying, yes, it's all clear. You go through the journey and yes, the call to actions are clear. The things are clear. So by trying to understand a little bit more what was causing this, we kind of started looking at the fact that the submission phase was not the problem. We kept interviewing around why submission was not happening. And we didn't apply a systemic thinking where, actually, submission was the last step. The problem was at the beginning, the confidence at which you add the data in the first instance. Now, how you get to that is about looking at, hey, how long does it take to fill the data? How people feel? What are the journeys they go through? How do they ask and talk about things? And how do you make sure you explore the whole length of the journey, triangulating all the data sources from the behavioral, from the different types of qualitative from the user journey mapping, and then you build up that knowledge. Only interviews wouldn't give you that because you would miss the fact that there were issues in the submission. While only analytics wouldn't tell you that the issue actually was not the submission, it was at the beginning. So it's the combination of all those two that really makes richness of the data and helps design to voice that, actually, we don't need to change the checkout. The last mile, we need to change the onboarding. And I don't know if you can elaborate a little bit more on that, but how did this change the internal conversation about the feature to implement or something to put on the roadmap? What kind of conversation did you have? So the conversation where we had PM saying we have problems in the submission part. So we were putting a lot of energy in the design team to, hey, what's wrong with the submission until you don't get to get a little bit more broader because the designer needs to have empathy and needs to start looking at things in a different way and start looking at how is the journey evolving over time? What is the error rate in the different phases? How the error rate are influencing the journey? And this is how actually designers are going into having those conversations where they bring the empathy and combine with empathy the data that they see in the product analytics at the end of the day. So is it right to say that by using this approach, you started with a business problem which might also be eventually a user problem, but the business problem is something that needs to be addressed that there is an urgency or that there is a cost associated to this or potential loss and then finding the solution. That's where sort of the qualitative aspect comes in, but you need that first part, you need that business challenge in order to have a stronger, stronger voice in the conversation. Is that a good summary? It's a good summary. You need to understand when you have a problem, if it's a symptom or it's a problem. And this is the power of design thinking, where you look at things and you start analyzing, not from just, hey, this is happening. We need to change the checkout to the final part of the journey. It's where you start questioning and gaining that empathy and translating that business problem, that behavioral data into the real issue and into kind of what is the root cause. And this is how you can combine and you can see the impact, improve the impact to your stakeholders, because you understand analytics, you use analytics to prove the point that by running experiments, you are actually increasing speed to submit. You're increasing the quality of the experience. You're increasing how the user goes through the journey and how things happen, which before designers were not able to do, because if they don't use analytics to prove the impact of their work, they are just telling story and not showing and proving data. I know some might say that stories are the way our world works, but that's a conversation for different part. I still want to explore this together a bit further, because it's very interesting. And the example that you give around the checkout, we might say, okay, that's a pretty isolated example. That's very tangible. That's quite easily to measure whether or not the conversion rate on something like a checkout page goes up. The challenges that we work on are usually more holistic, bigger. It's harder to create sort of a cause and effect relationship. What's your take on that? How do we deal with those kind of situations? You know, it's all about how you frame the questions and how you go and look at experiences. And what is influencing experiences? I mean, cause and effect are literally part of a problem assessment. It's all about playing the scenario and understanding what is that is really causing. So the question I always focus on is what is the problem and what is the symptom? Am I able to understand where the problem originates? Because it's the biggest issue in a lot of organizations. And it could be both in product or even what I do in design operations. I mean, the fact that we are late in delivering is a problem or it's a symptom. I mean, should I just add more people because we are late in delivering or should I just streamline the processes? So if you are not able to assess and have confidence and play scenario where you really say, this is the problem, how do I solve it? But what if this is not the problem, this is a symptom, then the solution and the route you go for is very different. And I think this is what distinguishes a good designer and a good design mindset where you combine equally design thinking with system thinking, because that's how you bring the richness of the experience and you start tackling problems from very different points of view. So again, this is fascinating. You mentioned systems thinking and this is exactly where my mind was also going because the moment we get into systems thinking like correlations and cause and effect become even more blurry, it's really hard in a system to pinpoint what I changed this specific aspect and then this resulted in more conversion. Usually it is what we changed a few things in the system and then as a compounding effect or because of these different changes, the output was X. But in a system it's really hard to measure this. And we are working usually on quite systemic issues. Totally. I mean everything we do is always has always to be looked in the system. The challenge is to understand what is your system? How is your system built up and what are the elements that constitute this system? How all the elements are being connected and what are those connections made of? Connections are not just relationships, they are ways of working. So if I think about design operations, my system is made by different stakeholders. So I can start talking to legal procurement, finance, product engineering, marketing, but then systems are made both by humans and non-humans. So then we have processes and tools and engagement models and workflows. So how does changing all those elements in one team influences the other? So the biggest mistake that we do when we want to improve the way we work, for instance, is, hey, let's introduce a new tool. And then we forget to really look at how this tool that can be really, really key to help streamline the design team workflows or give visibility is going to affect marketing or product or engineering. Are they happy? I mean, do they have the same problem? Because if they don't have the same problem, what are we solving for? We are just moving one problem from one team to the next one. So understanding your system and understanding what are the weaknesses, the opportunities that the other part of the system have will help to create those approaches that actually delivers value and propagates positive benefits across the system, rather than just looking at one small aspect of your experience and thinking that everyone everywhere has your problem. So we need to be extremely empathetic and systemic in how we do things in our work. Isn't part of the challenge that we as a community are dealing with the fact that we are systemic and we are operating in organizations that are very compartmentalized and have a very narrow focus, which makes things easier to measure, to assign responsibility. Isn't that part of the challenge that we are more systemic and that we go against the structure of the organization? No, because organizations are made by people. So I don't accept organizations are made in silos and departments because that's on paper, but we are living and hopefully thinking beings. So our role is to understand how all those business units can cooperate. If there are silos, there are no silos because, hey, the organization has been defined as such. It's because people are not making that effort. So I think that the systemic thinking is way more applied in a narrow way, because if someone would apply it to a broader scope to the whole organization, then you will be able to create those workflows and conversations that actually really deliver value and really bring things and really break down the distinction that, oh, no, that's marketing, that's engineering, that's product. I mean, everyone should be working together. Everyone should be having the same goal, having the same vision and work together. So if it's not happening, it's not because of the organization. It's because systemic thinking hasn't been applied at its fullest. Yes, I totally agree. And then if we look at the initial question that we started with, how can we bring design back as a more strategic discipline, bringing it back as a strategic discipline, I think requires people to sort of see that everybody is operating in an ecosystem, that there are no silos, but from what I've been hearing and maybe those are exceptions, is that that's not happening. So we are coming in and then we have a conversation with product, which is usually quite, maybe narrower than our perspective, which makes, it gives a different starting point. So where I'm heading to is maybe we have the holistic perspective and that there are no silos, but if the rest of the organization still isn't there yet, how do we fit in and how do we show the initial value? It's proving it and it's also taking the responsibility. So when I was hinting that there have been some other promotions and some design leaders are very, very focused on the delivery because maybe they were absolutely great ICs and they're focusing on the delivery. What also has happened is a lot of delivery focus designers also started rebranding and moving into product organizations. So you will see that if you are someone that believes in design and believes that design thinking and system thinking are what can bring design into leadership position again and even better. Now you need people to do that and it's not happening for whatever reason. I mean, I'm not blaming people that are rebranding themselves as product. I mean, if you have a mortgage and you need to work, I mean, that's where the market is going and it's fine, but we still need some strong design leader that it's not telling just, okay, product, yes, we deliver this and we rely entirely on the product roadmap that influences this and proves this. And you just need to start doing it and proving it. I mean, it's not about saying it, it's creating the relationships and the conversations. You know, my magic word is always experiment. Run an experiment and prove how design can bring value to the product organization so that you can be equal partners and start new conversations. So and it requires accountability, taking the responsibility. Can you elaborate on the last part, accountability, responsibility on or regards what? On driving a design function and trying to take the risk. I mean, if you, if you, your design team is seeing that there's a big opportunity, a big unmet need that the organization can solve because we have the resources, this is within our product opportunities. This is within our organizational north star. So we have what it takes to solve a big unmet need. Now, this is how design, a design leader should start building the case and driving some user-driven innovation into the product roadmap rather than just accepting that the roadmap is driven by the product organization. So it means that you are so convinced that you take the responsibility of using some resources of your team, of the organization to test an idea and see what is the value that that idea can bring to the customer and to the business rather than just accepting no as an answer or no, we don't do things like that. Great. We wish we had more design leaders taking that risk and it's not even risk if we know that it's based on our experience that it's going to add value than actually pursuing on that, having the courage to do that. What have you seen that works to prove the value? And I can imagine that there are some easy answers to this, but that's usually the hard part because we said we might get qualitative insights that the thing that we've developed worked, but I feel that you feel that that's not enough. That's not enough. Most of my experience is in operations, so I can share how I drive change and what is the type of change you can drive because design thinking also requires system thinking and change management. So you can't do that if you don't take everyone on the journey. We were mentioning before everything is a story, so you need to craft your story in a way that brings everyone to see what you see. So some people get to conclusion faster, other people it's a little bit more skeptical. So it means when you start assessing how something is going, you look at the qualitative data, which is, hey, experience is always subjective. So we can't go against what the qualitative data is telling us. If users thinks X, Y, Z, that's it. I mean, we can't change it. That's good. Then let's look at what they do. So let's look at the behaviors. Again, I do these in operations. I look at what my design team and the product teams are thinking and telling me, hey, I hate working with design or I love working with design and it's not my role to tell them you're right or wrong. Then I start looking at what are the behaviors? So what is happening in the product? What is happening in the roadmap? What is happening in the tools that we're using? Hey, there's something that is not working here because you're telling me that you love a tool, for instance, but you're not using it. So tell me more. Analytics tell me this is not working. So you start then digging into qualitative and quantitative and having more conversation until you can't frame the problem and you share it. The moment you share the problem and you have the data, the quantitative, the qualitative, your stakeholder needs to acknowledge it. And if they acknowledge it, that's the moment you can start running experiments and say, okay, listen, if we agree that this is a problem, we don't need to change anything. Let's just try to do something that incrementally solves this and run experiments, setting up metrics and KPI that you can measure because if you can't measure it, you can't change it because you can't prove the value that you're bringing. And that's equally valuable in operations or in product design or everything because no one will stop someone that has a strong data backed, inside backed point of view from running small experiment to show the potential. And that's how you can start bringing that change. This is how you start taking responsibility. It's not about being harsh and going out and say, I want to change the world. That's not going to fly at all. And then the biggest change that I've been able to drive and I'm currently driving the change across the design and product organization has been by, hey, I have these hypotheses. I've seen this. I measured this. I think we can do something here. Are you up for me to try an MVP approach? And then as more people have seen the improvement, the clarity, the transparency, depending on your goal, I mean, the more room and freedom I've been given. So it's about proving, showing and not telling. We probably all agree with experimentation that that's the best way to actually show value. First, you have to somehow bootstrap and get the permission to do those experiments. And what you're sharing with us is it helps if you can also back your, let's call it a business case, back your business case up with hard data and hard, in this case, numbers shown where the potential is in things that the organization is measuring. Which might not be the area a lot of designers feel comfortable with. Exactly. It's what we were saying. So we need more pie shaped, versed in data, versed in understanding the numbers, versed in creating measurements. Every problem can be measured. I mean, I always say, especially when thinking about changing behaviors, changing processes, engagement model, I'm not going to launch a skyrocket in the sky. I need directional measurements. I need to create my own metrics so that I know what are the trends. And I know how things are going. Even just measuring the perception, qualitative data, qualitative data is people's perception. How happy you are. What is your life work balance? Now you start with a measurement and that measurement will tell you the prioritization that you need to do regarding different problems. But over time, you will see that this, hey, life work balance score will tell you, hey, are we changing the perception? How people feel about work? Are we changing how they do? It's not a hard measurement, but then you can also triangulate with how many sick days are people taking? How do they feel? And then you see, and what is the churn of the team? And you can create a lot of valid data points that will help you to create a business. And you know what? Start talking the business language because no one talks empathy at business level. They talk number and results. And this is what is also missing in the design leadership today. In design leadership, it's missing the empathy aspect or the numbers aspect? The numbers aspect, the ability to translate the design language, the design way of thinking is to something that the business leadership fully understands. Again, it's not a generalization, but I see that one of the biggest challenges that some design leaders have is translating the business impact, creating metrics, dashboard. I mean, if you look at the number of workshops or coach's tutorial that try to help designers to measure the impact, that's a symptom. We are not able to really measure the impact of what we do. We need to be better. We need to create the infrastructure of what matters and become as leaders more aware of the need of quantifying what we do and why we do. You mentioned we are not able to measure the impact of our work. What is your analysis? What do you feel? What's the root cause of why we're not able to measure the impact? It's just because we are so used to talk about empathy. It's because, I mean, I do some coaching. I do some mentoring at different levels. And the question that most frequently I'm asked is, how can I measure the impact of my team on the organization? And the problem is we are very, very good at understanding the problems, but not at translating those problems into business impact. If we want to go back to fully apply a systemic approach to design thinking, where we see the problem, but we don't see how the fact that the team is unhappy or the fact that we are inefficient translates all inefficiencies on the product side, on the engineering side, and ultimately on the business side. So if we are not capable of quantifying problems and the negative impact of our problems on the time to deliver, on the quality of the delivery, on the relationships, on the time to market approaches, we won't be able to prove the value that we bring to the organization. And it's again a maturity thing because it requires a lot of thinking. It requires a lot of analysis. And it's not something that you are being taught into in a design school. I mean, no one really talks about design dashboard measuring the impact of design. And this is also why probably some of the best, most inspiring design leaders I had the pleasure to work or talk with have either an engineering background or a business management background, because they are capable of combining the power of empathy, the systemic thinking and the business thinking into into a vision that actually becomes compelling and talks directly to the business and to the user and to the teams. And it's it's able to to prove the value. I like the example that you shared where figuring out on a human level that I don't know your team is unhappy or the happiness score is going down. Everybody probably can imagine the desk that's going to impact the quality of the delivery, the speed of the delivery. I feel that the challenge isn't there. The challenge might be in how much does it impact the speed of delivery? How would we bridge that gap? So we see a challenge on a human level, we see how that could impact the business. The question is the tough question is probably how much? How much you can always try to come up with what I call directional measurements. So you don't have just to look at your team, you have to look at how your team works with others. So let's assume we know let's make up a story, but it's not necessarily a makeup story, right? Let's assume that there's a team that actually is telling you that half of the projects that are being asked to deliver by the product organization. So we already have a problem because everything comes from the product organization. It doesn't have a PRD. Suddenly no PRD, fine, you start working. A product requirement documents. So a clear documentation that tells the designer this is the feature we're going to build, this is how it should work, this is the context, this is where this feature should go. So in half of the cases, there's nothing like that. And then you also figure out, again, you get a number that more than half of the projects that the design team is working on doesn't get delivered. Now you start seeing that what is the behavior that this can trigger? The behavior that this triggers is every time a designer is being allocated to a project, they will generally wait up to a week or two before they start doing anything. They wait because they hope to get more clarity, and they wait to see if the priorities don't change. The result is they take their time, and then suddenly they need to rush. And when you work at speed, what happens is your attention span drops, which means you do more errors. Now if you do more errors, you will have to do extra work to make corrections. On the top of that, I also tend to have a measurement called rework. Rework means how many work do you need to do that it's not incremental improvement, because hey, you did some tests or no, it's just what you need to do because your stakeholder changed their mind or the requirements have changed, and something that it's out of your control. And that's often anywhere around 50%, 45%, which is a lot. So you start seeing all these inefficiencies. Now that's not just design. That means that product team will have a lot of tensions and issues with the design team, because the design team is not performing. But that also goes down to the engineering team, because engineering team then will have shorter time to bring everything in production. And then you start looking at what is the consequences on the go-to-market strategy? What is the cost of the missed opportunity? Hey, our competitor went out with that feature four weeks before us. So what does it mean? They were the first one coming out with this feature or whatever it is. So you start looking at a more systemic approach of things. And I can tell you, I mean, I've been collecting data in four organizations, and the number of projects that are currently delivered as planned, as originally planned, is anywhere between 15% and 20%. Then you will have a good 25% that are delayed, another 20%, 30% that are dropped, and then a 15%, 20% that are added. Now you see that all this creates some big issues, and it becomes a big issue for the team. But then for all the teams, it will create tensions, and by creating tensions, it will create more problems, more issues. And ultimately, it will just create the conditions for churn, for low quality work, and for just kind of poor execution of design, poor execution of design, not design thinking and not really design exploiting the potential of design. Thank you for sharing this story that definitely helps with hearing from your experience or your story. We somehow ended up discussing a lot about measuring, showing value, proving. This is more than just a thing you can do on the side. This is a full time job. You mentioned that you've been doing this across four organizations. I'm just trying to imagine having to dig up all these numbers which might be there, which might not be there. You might need to set up new measurement frameworks, introducing new KPIs. Again, it's important work. It's a lot of work. The question is, is it onto the design community, or is there somebody else who should be responsible for this? Yeah, no. Just a lot of work. Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's a full time work. Because in an ideal world, you will have a designer that design lead, who is responsible for the product vision, who is responsible for looking at the market, looking at the strategy, working with the product organization, making sure that we are building the experiences and the products that actually will deliver value to the customer. But then, once you have this design strategy, you need to operationalize it. You need to look internally, not externally, on, hey, what are the tools we have? What are the problems we have in the process? What are the skills we miss? Today, if you don't upskill your team to artificial intelligence, you are losing out big time. Someone needs to look internally and create an operational roadmap that enables the product and the design roadmap and strategy to be executed. Now, this is also why a lot of the design leads are struggling, because they are not seeing the value of operationalizing their strategy. They are focusing a lot on the design vision, but they are not spending sufficient time into thinking about how you do that. Do you have the right tools? Do you have the right skills? Do you have the right people? Do you need more people? Do you have the right processes? Do you have the visibility? Do you have the engagement models? That's a full-time job. Unfortunately, we still don't have a culture or a widespread culture where design operations is seen as a strategic discipline, rather than being, hey, someone that takes care of the licenses, someone that deals with the procurement team, someone that just looks at the budget. Now, you need to have a strategy that says, hey, if we need to deliver three new products for two new markets, in the next six months, we need to get some contingent workers or freelancers, because we don't have the capacity. And we need to get these specific skills, because that will enable us to do that. So it's a very different approach. It's a very different way of thinking. And it's something that it's not there yet, but slowly, slowly, more and more design leaders are acknowledging that you can't do well, the design leadership, product leadership, design strategy aspect, and the operational one. Exactly. And that's sort of the business case where having design ops sitting at the highest level in the organization next to design leadership. You need both. Because it requires two different mindsets. I mean, I wouldn't be good or as equally passionate if my focus would be on the product and looking at the market and looking at solving problems for customers. I love being a facilitator. I love seeing my team thrive. I love finding out, how can I enable everyone to deliver better? How can I increase transparency and visibility? How can I enable my team to say no? I mean, you won't believe, but I think that one of my biggest mission with my design teams is always empowering them and teaching them to say no. Because being nice, it's an issue. And every time you say, yes to something, you're saying no to a lot of other things, including your free time, the quality of the work you deliver, or simply life of balance. Yes. Saying no. Opportunity cost. There was always an opportunity cost. Exactly. Patricia, if you have to leave us with some practical advice, and maybe we can formulate this in, let's assume we also want to make design or bring it back to the strategic discipline. It always was. What's one thing we should try to avoid and what's one thing we should definitely do? Avoid just saying yes. So learn to say no as a design leader and then trying to focus more on understanding what are the missed opportunities that we are not exploiting enough because we are so focused on executing on a product roadmap that you are missing out on exploiting the power of empathy, bringing back the user into the driver's seat with design so that we do more customer-driven innovation and we get a product roadmap that it's equally informed by what is the product vision and what is the opportunity that we can get from the user and get the help of a design operations partner because you will be able to literally just focus on what matters for the organization and you will have a partner that can help you to quantify, measure, create those efficiencies that will help you to look good, but also to build a case and explain what is that design can bring to the organization. Thank you for that summary and I wholeheartedly encourage everybody to look for somebody who's into design ops. Even if they don't currently have that role, there's probably somewhere in the organization who can fill that role in. So Patricia, thank you for bringing, shining a light on that added role that's going to strengthen us and to bring us back into the place where we need to be as design. So thank you again. Thank you Mark for having me and for the really insightful and nice conversation. That was a pleasure. It was a fascinating conversation with Patricia, which hopefully gives you a lot to think about and chew up on in the coming days. My personal takeaway is that we need to collaborate even more with the design ops community. We've said it before here on the show and I truly believe it. This collaboration is our best bet to make design an indispensable discipline that hugely contributes to the strategy of the company. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please do me a huge favor by clicking that like button if you haven't done so already. This lets me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. Finally, before we part ways, please take a moment to reflect and celebrate that by joining us today, you've directed your attention towards learning and growing as a professional. So from everyone who you're going to impact through your work, thank you for taking the time and making the commitment. My name is Mark Fontijn and I look forward to having you with us again for a new conversation on the service design show. Take care and see you soon.