 What is it like to be on the inside? Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to a brand new episode of the Serbs Design Show. In this episode, you're going to hear stories from five in-house service design professionals. Who are these people that fight the challenge to build better services from the inside? What are the common challenges they face? And which important lessons can they share with all of us? Even if you're currently not working in-house, I think you'll find these stories very insightful. The conversation that you're about to hear is part of the campfire. And in the campfire, a small group of in-house service designers gets together for six weeks to learn from each other, to expand their professional network and just to slow down a little bit to reflect on the journey that they're on. If you too feel that you could use some support and guidance from other service design professionals outside of your own organization, consider joining the next campfire group. We have a very limited number of seats available in each group, so there is an application process. If you want to learn how to apply, head over to serbsdesignshow.com slash campfire. The deadline for the next group is June 28, 2021, or sooner if we reach the max number of participants before that date. So head over to serbsdesignshow.com slash campfire and read how to apply. Now without any further ado, let's jump into the conversation with Luciana, Taylor, Juliana, Dan and Amy. Let the show begin. Welcome to the Serbs Design Show Campers. Hi Mark. Hi Mark. Hi Mark. Good to see you all. Again, for our final campfire session, we're going to reflect a little bit on what has happened. We're going to dive into some of the tips and advices around in-house service design. So let's dive in and I would like to start with you, Dan. So my first question would be to you, could you give a 30 second introduction of who you are and what you do as an in-house service designer these days? Sure. Thanks, Mark. So my name is Dan Butt. I am a service designer and design manager at a nationwide nonprofit organization in the US. So I work across the organization and with our network of partners to bring new products and services to life. And my next question is, what brought you to the campfire? What made you join sign up for this six-week journey? Yeah. Well, it's a new function within the organization. I think one of the main things I was really looking for was how to help think about positioning service design and innovation and design thinking within the organization and really thinking about how do we speak to the value of service design? How do you think about where it can have the most impact and what are the right types of teams and structures? So really just helping to learn from my peers about how it's working in other organizations and how that might apply to what my challenge is. And speaking about challenges, what would you identify as one of those characteristic challenges for in-house service designers? Yeah. I mean, again, because at my organization, it's still relatively new. So I think one of the major challenges just getting the space and time to be able to focus on maybe the problems where service design can deliver the greatest value, there's a lot of competing interests and there's lots of ways that we can provide value just in our skill sets that we have. But because the organization is still trying to figure out what's the most effective way to utilize service design, I think part of the big challenge is just being able to get the time to focus on and to buy in to focus on the things where maybe we can have the most impact. I think related to that is just being able to create the evidence that we need along the way so that we can build that social capital so that we can start to focus on some of those more impactful problems. And we've talked a lot about evidence in this campfire group. I'm curious if you could give a piece of advice to other in-house service designers who also want to be more successful, what would your advice be? Yeah. This is probably true of most organizations for most things, but I think it's extra applicable for service design because it's so new within organizations. It's just really make sure to find your champions and your allies. Because we're a new function within organizations, you really need to find the leadership, find leaders that can that respond to the value proposition and service design and that can speak to that. But you also need to find your allies. Sometimes people that have related functions within organization like product teams or marketing teams sometimes, they might not understand how we're different. And so being able to find those allies, build those quick wins or early wins so that you can advocate more towards those champions I think is particularly important. And if you could give a starting point, how do you go about finding allies? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I mean, looking for who's people that within the organization that's maybe doing similar work, who are people that naturally sort of gravitate towards, you know, human-centered design and service design mentalities and mindsets. You know, some as we all know, many people are doing service design and they don't really know they're doing service design. So finding those people within the organization that sort of have a natural affinity for within their existing work. Also, just try to find those people that are maybe open to the process but that are working on problems where a service design approach can really provide extra value and just being able to, you know, work with them in a non-threatening way and just find ways to help make whatever they're doing better. Now, based on your experience in the last six weeks of the campfire, what would you say is your biggest insight? Yeah, it's been an amazing experience and so grateful for it. I'd say one of the biggest insights, you talk a little bit about evidence. But just being reminded that we are service designers and we can apply that, you know, both to our, and we had a lot of conversations about that, but we can apply it both to our work but also to our workplace. And so really just thinking about the value of service design approach and the power of a reframe, you know, and the challenges that we're facing and how we can really think about reframing that in different ways and using service design, you know, stakeholder models and things like that maps to really think about the context in which we're situated within an organization, what needs to change and how might we intentionally kind of create the environment that we need to be successful to provide value to the organization. And I think it's just a reminder that, like, we have some of those skillsets. They're really unique skillsets, but it's just applying that, you know, in our intentional way. Getting reminded that we should eat our own dog food. And if we're preaching it to our internal clients, we should be able to use it on ourselves as well, right? Absolutely. Thanks, Dan. Thank you for sharing this and I'm going to move on to the next camper. Who is Juliana? Juliana, could you give a brief intro about who you are? Yeah, sure. Thank you, Marc. My name is Juliana and most of my professional life as a service designer I was a consultant in the educational project, which is connected with server design and design thinking. But last two months, I'm in a position of for in-house server design and innovation lab and some of the biggest retail company in Russia. Cool. Yeah. That's a different experience. So you're being your journey into in-house service design is quite recent and you still signed up and applied for the campfire. Why did you do that? What brought you to the campfire? Yeah, I think it was one of the points why what it bring me to campfire. First of all, of course, it's a desire to find the international community. And I guess I get it. So to talk over my questions and the pain points about my new in-house position and service designer and find some answers on my questions and to know some new interesting people from my professional field and inspire from them. Yeah, I guess it was. Yeah, I think in the weeks that we do the campfire, we really try to build not only connections, but relationships that might sound a bit abstract, but at least that's what we're going for in the campfire. If you could pick one of the biggest challenges for in-house service designers, what would you say is is that challenge? What? I don't have a big experience in this case, but of course, I already have some point and problem problems with it. And first of all, I guess it's not like a challenge of in-house service design. I guess it's a challenge of every person who are working in a large corporation. It's a bureaucratic system of a large corporation, which is like absolutely killing me. Chris, I never work in this field during four years already. So a bulky business process that does don't work most of the time. They just on the paper, but not like in life. And difficult to find the key of the problem and the main stakeholders and there's like a huge cooperation and difficulty find someone who will implement the new pilot that you bring to the project manager or their product or whatever, because product manager is always really busy in their process, but you bring something new and they're like, oh, I just can find some time for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like first challenges for me. That is a challenge within service design. It's so holistic. It's so silo, it's it's rising above silos. And then who has the ownership? Where do you even start? That is a challenge for sure. Based on your experience so far, which piece of advice would you give to other in-house service designers? Yeah, when I was thinking about it, I guess, improve your communication skills like as much as possible, especially if you're working in a really large corporation. It always not enough, I guess, always not enough. You can improve it and improve it and never stop. And like network inside of a very different department that really can help you if you really have a good communication skills because through communication, you will get what you really need quickly or just have a great communication leader in the team if you are really not good in communication. So what do you mean with communication? Because that's a very big topic. What kind of communication are we talking about? Like to have a connection with most of the stakeholders you're working so far. Know the key people in the company and try to connect with them somehow through your boss, through like personally, whatever, absolutely. Yeah, I guess this like to have a connection is like, yeah. And I guess the first point, the second point, I get my recommendation, develop a facilitation skills. And I guess this is really connected with communication skills because service designers really connect really a lot with sessions. And if your sessions are effective, interesting, like fun, inspired, nicely built and beauty, it brings more people for this sessions. And they will be really loyal for you. And of course, they will come to you and bring insights. And it really improve your project. Improve communication and facilitation skills. I can second that. Now, my final question to you, Juliana, is what is your biggest learning from the campfire? Yeah, I already told it on some of our sessions, I guess. My biggest like insight is that service design and as we all have the same challengers and no matter where we are, cultures, countries, nationality, and in my perspective, because service design mostly connect with people behavior. So like the human has one basic needs, which leads to behavior and attitude. And that's why like it doesn't matter where you are. Unfortunately, or thankfully, the challenges are really the same. Absolutely. And you can learn from all people from all over the world. And it doesn't matter. Yes, in US, UK, Russia, or Netherlands, I guess. That's the good thing, right? There is a whole community of people who have to deal with the same struggles and you don't have to deal with them alone, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Thanks, Juliana, for for sharing your story. Now it's time to move over to the United States. We're going to have a chat with Amy. Amy, could you give a brief intro? Morning, I think for me, it's morning. I am the service design part designer partner in a professional services startup. It's called Design Service Professionals, and we provide design services for the architecture, engineering and construction communities. Sounds really interesting. And I know that you're building the team, you're building the services behind practice there. What motivated you to join, I think, called the campfire? It sounded like a good idea at the time. I think it was about community for me, just looking for camaraderie and learning that comes from shared struggles. So kind of like Juliana was saying, we all seem to have very similar challenges within our very experience. And I was just looking for somebody who could share those experiences and support my learning as well. And how would you describe those challenges? Because there are many, which one would you pick and highlight? I think for me, I often find myself in meetings or experiences looking around and saying, where does service design fit in here? And is this the right time? And if it's the right time, how do I tell people it's the right time? What do I do? How do I just say, like, hey, we should move into service design now? Or do we just is it just like an underlying current in all the things that we do? I don't I don't always know. Yeah. Yeah. Finding the right time and place for service design. That's not that's not an easy task for sure. If somebody is struggling with that challenge as well, do you have a piece of advice for them? Um, I mean, I think I'm I'm. I'm learning that at least for me, I I'm looking at what it would look like to be my own service designer. So if if I was the client and I came in and said, this is what I'm doing, what advice would I give myself in working with these teams and working with my own internal team and then my partner teams? And how would I provide the support and the guidance that I really want to provide everyone? But how would I design that, you know, actually taking the time to design my own service within my practice? Yeah. Again, applying our own methodology on our own practice. Yeah. Um, what is the thing that you're going to take away from the campfire? This is hard. There's so many things I feel like I want to just hold on to the mural board and cuddle it for a few more weeks before I answer this question fully. But I think for me, what seems to stick out the most is this idea of evidence. We've talked about it a lot. I think Dan mentioned it too. But, you know, for when I look at evidence, it's not just, you know, the journey map at the end or the workshop and how everybody feels at the end. I feel like the evidence that we share is really layered. It might just be a suggestion and a meeting. It might be an introduction to the idea of designing a service. It might actually be calling out a service for what it is saying, you know, hey, you're actually designing a service right now. Can we just talk about that for a second? And so when we talk about this, we're almost dosing or layering that evidence in small ways until people are ready for more. And I need to look at that in my own practice and say, oh, hey, that's evidence. Not maybe out loud, but in general, just sort of like write down an evidence log, like, oh, that's evidence, you know, and kind of maybe even look at it like a prescription and what kind of what was that dosing and where was it in this person's learning and in this part of our process and kind of get a feel for what that looks like. We had Steve Portagall on the show twice. And in the first interview that I had with him, we ended up on the term noticing. And this is I feel very appropriate here. Like if we just be if we just are a bit more attuned to noticing evidence of service design, then that already will help a lot to actually articulate what we're doing and the value we're bringing. Yeah, I agree. Thanks, Amy. We're going to move from the United States to Sweden to Luciana. Luciana, could you give a brief introduction to who you are and what you do these days? Yeah. Hi, Mark. My name is Luciana and I am a UX designer. I've been working with UX for a long time and also with service design for the past five years. Currently, I work in a financial company and we deal with payment solutions. OK, so you mentioned UX UI. This is a campfire for in-house service designers. How did you end up here? Yeah, because I think the UX role, let's say, evolve it during the time. And it's quite common for the UX designers that start to notice like it's not only about the digital part, for example, we need to take a more broader and deeper look on what we are designing here. It's a whole ecosystem. So we start to notice like, OK, we need to touch upon all these areas if you want to build a real meaningful experience. That's a good message for all the UX designers listening to the service design show. So, Luciana, what would you say is a typical challenge for an in-house service designer that you have faced? Yeah, I think a service design is receiving more and more spotlight, but it's still not very clear what are the roles or the tasks or the benefits. So people get excited when they'll say, let's also work with the concepts of service design, but it's not very clear. It's not very clear. So I would say the challenge is like from the starting, trying to have things, some alignment, some expectations, keep discussing about this so we can make things more tangible and not so fluffy like what I'm doing here. Yeah. Is that also your piece of advice to other in-house service designers? Yes, I think so. Like it's not a one-time conversation. You know, it's not something like, OK, let's have a meeting, deciding what we are going to do. And no, it's a continuous conversation. And I think through these conversations, it's also possible to build bridges and to have some allies, stakeholders on your side, some buying. So, yeah, it's... Yeah, we've been mentioning this already a few times during this recording. But how would you do that? So if you would have to start over in your service design career and your service design journey, what would maybe be the first thing that you would do knowing what you know right now? Yeah, I think it's starting conversations with people in the company, you know, and make things more tangible. Like, how would you do that? Well, I don't know. With conversations, really, a grab for a coffee, have some meetings, have a workshop. I think it depends on the situation and depends on the people you were talking to or the stakeholders. I think also a bit of observation from your environment to see what is best fit for them. Yeah. And what is the thing that you feel needs to be made more tangible? Because I think if we're just discussing, let's say, in a fluffy terms like, OK, we need to map these or we need to improve this process, maybe it's not so tangible. But what exactly we need to improve here? What exactly we want with this change, you know? At least it's not that you are going to reach that point, but you can have some parameters here. Connected to reality and making it very specific. Yeah. I think the more specific you can do things, it's easier to keep this conversation and even later to prove some benefits. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Now, what is the thing that you're going to take away from this campfire? I think for me, first thing is to find a good community where you can discuss like a safe place, you know? Because through the discussions here, I could learn, I could learn other experiences and I learned a lot from this. And also having this continuous assessment, I think, with myself. Am I doing what I was expected to do? And I'm in an environment that is providing me what I need or if I need to do, to take some action because I feel that sometimes we forgot to access what we need and what we are supposed to do because we are kind of overwhelmed by the other. Yeah. And that's also the thing I've been trying to advocate a lot. Like when you're in-house, you're just working all the time. People are demanding things from you. You're always running. It's really hard to take a step back and reflect if you're actually running in the correct direction. And I think the campfire is an excuse for a lot of people to find that time to reflect and breathe for a moment. Yeah. Exactly. Thanks, Luciana. We're going to move to the final camper. And in this case, it's Taylor. Taylor, can you say hi and give us a brief intro into what you do? Hi, everyone. I'm also a UX researcher currently. Who is also a subject matter expert for service design within my company. I work at a software industrial company right now that's moving into the IoT space. Okay. Intriguing. We've been emailing about the campfire for quite a long time. And eventually you managed to get a seat. What motivated you to join? I was looking for a sense of community. I think I definitely got it with this group. But I also was looking for a way to kind of figure out what's my place in my current organization? What are my opportunities and where's the best place to really sink my teeth in with service design? Now, what would you say are some typical challenges for in-house service designers? I would say that there's always kind of this foreign element when you're introducing service design. Not everybody is familiar with it. People can get a little nervous when you're introducing it, especially because of the way it can kind of intersect with other disciplines, things like product design, you know, customer operations, all that fun stuff. So because we're in this interesting intersection point, you know, you have different dynamics to consider with people, you have to consider how you visualize and communicate that experience as well. So you're not like overwhelming everybody with your tools. I would also say, you know, another challenge that I've encountered was just kind of finding that balance between making sure that you know where you fit in, but not getting boxed in either. So I work in a digital space, right? But there's still lots of opportunity outside of that. So looking for those opportunities and not being afraid to push for them as well. Yeah, it's a lot of trade-offs and finding balances. Service design isn't easy. Where does it fit in? Yeah, it's definitely not easy. Based on your experience, what piece of advice would you give to other in-house service designers? Or maybe which piece of advice would you like to have? So I agree with Amy. There's so many good nuggets of advice that we got from this. I think that the biggest one, and I heard it over and over again from every person at some point in time is, you know, don't base your sense of success or value in your organization on the dynamics that you might be experiencing early on. You know, we, like I said, we are in a space where you might encounter friction. It's really common in our role to encounter that. And I think when we hit that friction, it's really easy to say, oh, I'm messing up. I'm not doing something right. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing, and we internalize and personalize that. And I think it's really important to seek ways outside of your role to validate your skills and to empower yourself so that that doesn't get to you, because that can really diminish your feelings of value and worth and really get to you after a period of time. I think part of this group is also the emotional component for everybody, just being able to share and those frustrations and chat about that. Have you found ways to find that validation? Yeah, yeah. I've been looking into more passion areas, ways that I can get involved with my community, looking at nonprofits. Dan, you are definitely inspiring some of that. And then also, you know, just looking for opportunities to freelance. I think that's a really great way to do it. There's tons of people that are always looking for help and may not even realize like who said this earlier, service design is a good fit for them. So I think, yeah, freelancing is a great way to do that. Cool. Cool take. Finally, is there anything else that you would say is a takeaway or an insight from the campfire next to the thing that you've already mentioned? Yeah. I am somebody, so I'm kind of a more extroverted person. So being in this space can always be challenging for my listening skills, I will say. And this definitely challenged that. But in a great new way, we focused on perspective when we were listening and it challenged me to think of new ways to like to listen to the problems and the views being expressed. I really dove into sociology and got back into that space. And that was really cool. That was actually a really great way to look at things. So I would say, yeah, when you're listening to your users, your customers, make sure that you're thinking about that. It's not just your perspective that's important, but think about listening from other perspectives as well. And is there a perspective that you found specifically valuable? I think it came down to the dynamic piece, the interpersonal dynamics piece. We talked about conflict theory and this idea of what's the resource, right? I think because we're in that intersection, sometimes we're seen as a threat. Sometimes we feel like we don't really know if we're fighting over the resource with someone and it can feel like that. So understanding what's the resource that I'm trying to get out of this whole situation, what are they trying to get? Are we even fighting over the same thing here? Or is there a way that I can position myself and what I'm doing to kind of remove some of that friction, right? To diminish it, to enhance our relationship. It's interesting that you mentioned this because communication has been mentioned in the last 30 minutes a few times. And listening is a really important part of communicating and maybe the campfire is adding or contributing or helping us to practice that a little bit more. As you've heard, it helps to connect with other services and professionals outside of your organization. If you want to be part of a next campfire group, here's what you need to do. Head over to servicedesignshow.com slash campfire. There you'll find all the instructions on how to apply. The deadline to send in your application is June 28, 2021 or sooner if we have reached the max number of participants before that date. And I review all the applications in the order that I receive them. So if you want to increase your chance of getting in, make sure to send in that application right after this episode. I hope that you found these stories useful even if you're not currently working in-house. Thanks a lot for making it all the way to the end of this episode. Keep making a positive impact and I'll catch you soon.