 In this episode we'll talk about what it's like to work at a company where design has a big role to play, we'll talk about how to build well-working design teams and we'll also talk about what it means to be a service design researcher, consultant and director. And here as the guest of this episode. Hi, I'm Farben and this is the Celsijn Show. Hi guys, my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome to a new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about learning from the ideas and thoughts of some of the world's best service designers. So you can use that knowledge to transform services and businesses all around the world to become more human-centered and eventually more successful. We talk about topics ranging from design thinking and customer experience to organizational change and creative leadership. We're bringing a new episode every two weeks on Thursday, so if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe. My guest in this episode is Fabian Schegholsterer. Fabian is currently the UX director for digital channels at a customer-owned bank, insurance and retirement fund company in Sweden. Fabian became known in the field for his PhD thesis called Stakeholder Engagement for Service Design. If you want to know more about that thesis, check out the link in the description. For the next 30 minutes or so, Fabian will be talking about three topics. What it's like to work at a company where design has a big role to play, how to build well-working design teams, and what it means to move from a service design researcher to a consultant to a director. If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. And if you're interested in the podcast version of this episode, head over to SoundCloud.com slash Service Design Show, where you'll find this episode and all the previous ones. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Fabian. Thank you. Fabian, you are someone who's been into service design for so long. Do you actually remember your very first memory of service design? I do, actually, because it was very much by chance. What happened? What's the story? I was approaching the end of my studies at Linköping University, and there was this new teacher coming in, a guy called Stefan Holmleid, and he started giving a course on service design and IT, and some other people were taking it. I'm like, hmm, I'm not sure. Well, well, it's something designer oriented. I'll try it. And I had this course, which was a really short one, and after a course like, okay, I know what I want to do. I thought I was going to be an interaction designer, but after doing my first course on service design, the new service design is the thing for me. What triggered you in that course that you thought that service design will be my destiny? The bigger scope, I think. I'm more of kind of big scope, painting the bigger picture guy than micro-interaction, so really being able to see the whole thing and building, people didn't even talk about custom journeys back then, but building the custom journey with all the different touchpoints and getting the whole thing together, that's what... Thinking in systems rather than the touchpoints. Exactly. When was this, 2000? Oh, this was probably 2006, 2007. That was the pin point, the big moment within service design. A lot of happened around that period. Exactly. Fabian, you've sent me three topics, and I've sent you some question starters, and we'll use those to co-create the questions as we go along. The first topic that I want to start with is about your personal journey, and this one is called Research a Consultant and Director. What is the question that goes along with this one? For me, I would go with how far. Please explain. How far can you come in a practitioner service design career if you start out as a researcher, and that's an academic researcher? So I started my career in service design as a PhD student and did a PhD, and I was all fine, I really enjoyed it, but then I asked you, I want to do service design, I want to do service design. You gained a lot of knowledge talking to a lot of people, written probably, how thick was your PhD? Two or three hundred pages. To be honest, I haven't looked at it for the last five weeks. So that was a big chunk, and I had connections all over the service design world. Since we were also one of the pioneers, everybody knew everybody back then. So it was easy to get a job, of course. No, it wasn't. It was actually quite difficult. I had lots of connections which I could call on, but what I noticed quickly was that, I don't know, I would say it's straight to my face, the attitude was, yeah, we know you can research and think, but can actually do service design as well. So I quickly noticed that the companies which were actually the most interested in my competence were rather UX or interaction design consultancies which wanted to move into service design, and for them it would be like a feather in the head to be, but look at this, we have the first service design PhD in Sweden in our company. So once I actually ended up going the first within talking, discussing employment, were that kind of agencies, and that's also the role I landed in them and started working as a consultant at a UX agency called USIFI and my task there was to build a service design branch of the company. And then what happened? Well, it was a slow process since you need to learn the whole company, like the first half year was very much about getting everybody in the company on board to understand the service design, the mind shape from, oh, isn't UX and service design the same thing? And if you just look at briefly, it might seem like it, but if you start working you understand the difference. So moving the company and then finding my voice and talking to customers well, especially if you come from an academic background, then start to meet clients and being able to sell. So from, I need this ton of references and I need this elaborate language to keep it as simple as possible. That was a journey as well to actually do that. But I would say it took roughly a year and then we started finding how to sell it and people within the company started doing things and we were actually, I was pushing quite a lot for the government gems, the global government gems. We organized a few of them as well. So being involved in the gem community was also a big push for both the company that people got to practice doing it. We had internal gems and so on and moving in that direction. And then what's about the director part? How does that fit in? That's my current role. So after having been at the agency for two, two and a half years I felt like my mission was to establish self-sign and have a self-sign offering and we had that. So I started feeling like my mission here is completed. What's my next task at hand? And then I saw a role which I couldn't resist a company called Lansforsettinga, which is a tongue twister for those of you who don't speak Swedish, which is a really large company in Sweden where it starts as an insurance company with roots from 801 from the beginning. So it's a real old company. And then since the mid-90s it's also a bank and there's insurance, life insurance, retirement funds and everything and patent insurance so really everything within insurance and banking economy. And especially insurance were really big. So we are, I think we have 3.8 million customers in Sweden and there are 10 million people in Sweden. So more or less four out of 10 Swedes are a customer in the company. So I moved into that role being the UX director working closely together with our design director which is more graphic design oriented. So the two of us together manage the design part of all the digital communications of this big insurance company, all the customer facing. And how does service design fit in in you're now talking about UX and isn't just doing the digital parts sort of limiting for you or how do you experience that? Both actually. I see that having a service and background and being able to see the longer journey talking about the customer journey. Not only because we do a lot of internal projects and we need that service and we need that service and we need to sell that specific insurance to actually be able to see the whole customer journey frozen and think about that which the projects themselves might not. That helps me a lot. Having the service and background also with talking about all our consultants because we had a team of roughly 20 people working with design and we're two people managing together that team. So having a service and background has me a lot there and also keeping on pushing the boundaries of what we're allowed to do because that's something you can really see that just I've been here for roughly a year now and just short of a year when I started the kind of projects and that were kind of okay we have this business developers who have done this and this and I want to have a digital interface and just during this year I see how we are moving more and more towards services. I wouldn't say we do proper services yet but we do digital services today. So are you moving towards the front end of innovation instead of being sort of the last part? Definitely. Is that the change that is happening? Yeah. So I know for example we are starting up a big customer insight work together with the retirement fund section because they see we have this much digital stuff we want to do from the business perspective. Now we need your help to understand what's the most important from customer perspective. So we start with this section then we move on to that section. So we're actually helping them in formulating what to do and in which order to do stuff based on the same perspective. So let's try to recap and answer your question in one sentence or how far can you come? As far as you dare to push. So it's not your background which limits you rather what you want, what you dare to do. Right, let's move to a topic that is I think closely related to what you have already been talking about and this is like what it's like working in a corporation where design plays a big role. So what's the question starter? Work? Yeah. How can we work in a corporation or rather create a corporation where design is allowed to pay a big role? So did the company what was the role of design within the company like in the past years? Has it changed? It has changed, it's constantly changing and what I can see and the people who have been working they're longer than me they've been doing a great job also talking to friends who work for other banks for insurance companies in Sweden and we seem to be farther ahead but was really like coming from my consulting background and the first big project I went into you know as a consultant used to explaining qualitative research where you need to interviews rather than service and so on and going into my first meeting I was all prepared okay I got this big argument for a bank and now I'm going to show them how to do it and I said we need to do 20 interviews to understand this and we need to go to these parts and okay when are you finished? That's the rather they're not even questioning the value how we want to go about instead of should we do it this feels logical Yeah so that's what I couldn't talk about design people wouldn't know that but there's such a big trust in what our organization the digital organization does so people are not even questioning our ways of working rather they accept it and see you're delivering good stuff we trust you guys do whatever you feel is the best So how did you create or how was the situation how did it come to life because it sounds fantastic It is really fantastic and something which has kind of surprised me and I always tell people this story is winning awards Winning awards Yeah I used to be really like oh awards those are stupid those who apply for awards win them but what I noticed here is that actually they had a conscious strategy of going for awards so we won like our mobile app has won like 3, 4, 5 years in a row the best mobile app in Sweden and so on and what's really cool about that is that that makes the whole organization really proud about look we have the best app in the business and that also shows okay since they're winning best in the business they probably know what they're doing so it builds internal leverage more than just winning that award and patting yourself on the shoulder the internal leverage is an even greater asset of winning that award so that they actually at some point decided we need a goal oh let's go for awards because that's kind of what happened has really created leverage and is showing the people internally within the company that what we're doing is a good way of doing things and that should trust us so my take would be win awards Win awards well unfortunately there aren't that many service design awards out there yet so that's I guess a bit challenging but I can see how people would trust a department more if it's getting recognition from the outside yeah exactly so winning awards doesn't have to be it was the way they chose to do it here but being out there talking about your organization and letting people know what you're doing and also let people in China know that you're being recognized by others and they feel as experts and being really good at what you're doing so have you seen the balance between awards can be a public prize but usually are given by experts what is the balance between those kinds of awards and the recognition you get from clients like you do 10 interviews and you get really good testimonials from clients what is the balance in there and actually we are mostly winning awards where the clients are the judges themselves so there are a few big awards we in Sweden which actually is pop-up service on the web page or in the app where they actually get to rate their experience and that's winning but also so that's actually what we see really how strong the brand is and what we're doing that we're getting customer feedback otherwise in our usability test which we do once a month or more we usually have such a small detail we notice it's released to get people in on board because they like us and then we discuss but then they usually really are like this doesn't seem serious or what kind of company would do that but that's kind of that's the feedback which helps us do the really good stuff but I can't really see one or the other because they're meeting the users it's part of building the whole thing and then we get all the informal feedback which is hey this is really good or this is crap and then we learn from that as well and where do you see designer heading in the next two or three years within the company getting a larger and larger role which is really cool what do you mean? for example during just the last half year until then we're on the customer facing stuff now the internal project, oh we've been in a new system for this or that so we have right now I think two or three designers who only work on internal projects so we actually get to help to build a system which are different kind of managers and this and we're in English the people actually work with customers the systems they are doing and how we meet our customers online so we actually get to help with the internal system that's a great sign of the trust we're getting do you expect to the word UX to break out of that and become customer experience or service design or will UX still be an important term in the next years? I think UX will be an important term because that's a time people actually learnt what we actually call UX that will change now it's very much about the digital I already see we're moving from UX to also what I would call service sign but in turn I'm not going to argue with people as well as long as you let me do what I believe is the best thing we don't want those definition discussions let's move on to the third topic and this one I think we're sort of lucky in this episode because this one builds really nicely upon what we've talked before and it's called building a well working team a well working design team yeah and I will be boring and choose how can we again how can we build a well working design team so what is your idea of a well working design team where every designer gets the opportunity to do the best from their perspective and what the organization allows them to because there will always be organizational stuff hindering you or in our case bank and insurance lots of regulations which says oh we can't receive, we can do this amazing user experience and then you get to the lawyers and you're only allowed to do this because there's an EU law hindering us from doing this on the other hand we also have cases right now because there's a big law coming out first of January which gives customers more access to their bank data which also allows us as a EU access service signers to do even more the bank has to go oh we need to present this and this information so that's a really good opportunity to go both ways but back to the question well working design teams yeah so for us it's actually getting people to know each other and knowing what happens since we have three main channels it's our app it's the web login pages and it's the non-logging web pages and especially the app and the web login pages it's the same thing but for different customer types more or less it's actually making sure that those two team work closer together and know each other and we have so many things happening though because one thing the most important thing for me is that we have once a week for one hour everybody who works as a graphic designer, UXer, service designer or and some of the more UX UI oriented front enders we gather in a room and everybody gets two minutes, only two minutes to show what they've been working on from last week so you can't really go into detail but that makes everybody knows what someone else is doing and since we started doing this half a year ago we really know how much more people talk to each other to get to know each other previously they were kind of siloed and now we try to much better and talk to each other and hey didn't you do that the same half a year ago in the app and now it's time for the web login pages how did you do it? to actually collaborate and learn from each other so it's like about creating an excuse for people to talk about the work yeah it's creating an excuse right yeah and creating opportunity to actually have the time to see what's the same thing we would use ability testing so nowadays we always go out once a month somewhere in the country in Sweden and we send one from the app team, one from login pages one from the open, what we call open pages the not logged in web pages and they together do usability tests and test different aspects of their so they actually get to see and hear the feedback and do they have to bring in their experience back into their organization to share it exactly, yeah after each usability test you go back to your project and show what we learned and then you improve your design and then you can bring it and then we have always all you access get to hear what's learned from one usability test even though you don't work on that project so we always make sure there's a lot of feedback going on and creating the informal barriers because I think that's the main thing about a well working team getting them to feel that they actually have the mandate and power to go and talk to each other not only I have this project, I need to work on this but I have an idea which might help you and that actually start talking to each other and realize everybody gains on talking to each other so you have more perspectives, more ideas so just giving people the mandate to do what they feel is right is my priority and if you look back on this is there something that you would have have done differently or sooner I think I would have started with a joint usability test sooner when I started actually when I started I rather quickly noticed that there were silos between UX teams that was my focus for the first half year as a UX director to get everybody together as a team and then as a next step there was a usability test together but I see so much good coming out of that so I would have started with that sooner so really forcing them to hear the feedback the others are getting on their designs and as a designer you can stop yourself from thinking about how could you improve that have you changed for instance also something in the physical environment, have you changed how people sit or how the space is created we have but partly by chance because we actually moved floors in February previously everybody was sitting very much in their own channel where they delivered now we created what I'm calling the design island it's a mid design director and some other designers sitting together because we sit six and six and then I made sure that almost all designers sit just around us it's really easy for them to hey do you have a minute so we can actually talk the whole time formally and I really see how that has improved communication and the ease of talk previously people kind of forgot oh do you have five minutes now oh can you just throw away that question when two people are discussing design issue and a five person oh have you thought about that I remember six months ago we did that so just talking about the informant and having the seating so you can create the informant environment it's sort of increasing the opportunity or the chance that these kind of conversations will happen exactly we could do a whole episode about this because it's super interesting we should so Fabian I'm always interested in we've talked about three topics that you provided but is there to ask the people who are watching or listening to this episode so do you have a question for us how do you go about creating the slow improvements in your organizations and with slow improvements small incremental improvements because what I see we usually talk about innovation the innovation part of design is so important but my current role actually being able to do the small steps is so important too in the end reach the girl we're aiming for leave your thoughts in the comments really curious what people will have to say about this Fabian this is all we had the time for in this episode flew by as always so thank you for your time thank you for having me so what is your biggest insight based on what you've heard in this episode let us know down below in the comments about helping you to become a better service designer by sharing real life stories of people who are currently shaping the service design field if this is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews be sure to check out some of the best episodes and don't forget to subscribe to the channel for now thanks for watching and I'll see you in two weeks time with a new episode