 In this episode, you're going to learn what it's like to be part of a leading service design studio. So without any further ado, let the show begin. Hi, I'm Steven and this is the service design show. Hi, I'm Carrie and this is the service design show. Hi, I'm Tucker and this is the service design show. Hi, I'm Shreya and this is the service design show. Hi, my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are those hidden things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and planet. This is a very special episode of the show because in this episode, you're going to get an exclusive inside look and hear the stories from the team at harmonic design. You'll hear how they communicate the value of service design, how they find new clients, what they see as the biggest misconception around service design, what they enjoy most about the work and 20 other things or so. The background to this episode is that the founder of harmonic design, Patrick Waterbaum, appeared on the show in episode 115 and based on that initial conversation, a partnership grew between us. I can't express enough how grateful I am for the support that harmonic design has been giving to the service design show and the service design jobs platform. It's really partnerships like this that help me to keep on creating content for you. And I think this partnership also shows the commitment harmonic design has to keep on maturing the practice of service design and nurture this community. They really care. So in May 2022, harmonic design is celebrating its four year anniversary. And we thought that that would be a great opportunity to invite some people from the team onto the show and hear from them what it's like to be part of this leading service design studio. I reached out to the service design show community and asked which questions do you have for the team? And I got a ton of replies. So thank you for that. The conversation you're about to hear is kind of an ask me anything format. And the participants promise me upfront that they would give me the truth and nothing but the truth. I think that held up pretty well. But listen to the entire episode and judge for yourself. Hey, it's Mark from the future here. After recording the episode, we found out that Shreya's video feed wasn't as reliable as we hoped. Luckily, we managed to get all the audio in one piece. And the conversation was so good that we decided to keep the episode as it is and not re-record it. I hope you're ready because we're going to dive into the conversation with Shreya, Stephen, Keri and Tucker. Here we go. Welcome to the show, everybody. Hey, Mark. Hey, Mark. Hey, Mike. Hello. Hello. How am I team? This is going to be an interesting episode. We haven't done something like this on the show before, so I'm really curious how this will work out. Really excited that you're here. Like I mentioned in the introduction, we have a bunch of questions from the service design community about what it's like to be part of a team like Harmonic. Some are very interesting questions. Some are provocative. Some are a little bit deep and we'll try to cover them all. We have a few different formats in which we're going to do that today. I'll explain the formats briefly. We're going to finish the sentence. We're going to do a lightning round and we have a deep dive question. It's all going to play out in the coming minutes. Should be fun, light, hard, not too complex. And hopefully we'll get to learn you a little bit better and the Harmonic team. But before we dive in, I know you a little bit, but the people who are listening right now maybe have no clue. So I would love to go over and do a brief introduction about who you are and what you do. And Shreya, sorry, maybe you could start. And the thing I'm curious about is what's your background and how long have you been part of Harmonic? Well, thanks, Mark. As you know, my name is Shreya. I am a service designer at Harmonic. We're based in Atlanta and I have a background in industrial design. And I soon kind of made my way into service design when I wanted to just learn more about one touch point in a service. And I've actually been with Harmonic a little over, I mean, almost three and a half years now. So it's been a fun and exciting journey so far. All right. Three and a half years industrial design background. Awesome. Thank you. Stephen, what is your story? Well, I've been with Harmonic since before the beginning for about five years. So my background is a wild zigzagging through human-centered design fields. Started off originally in visual design, went into UX, done a lot of design research in different media, including industrial design, service design is the latest stop. I'm curious what's next, but maybe we'll get into that later. Thanks, Stephen. Carrie, what about you? Well, like Stephen, I have a background that kind of weaves in and out of different disciplines. And I started too in visual design and made my way through different marketing roles and business and technology, but always had that kind of through line to design, which brought me around 2009, 2010 to service design. And in particular, I got really interested in organizational systems and how everything works together. So it was like, it was a natural fit when I decided to jump in with service design fully. And how long have you been with Harmonic? A little bit over a year. Okay, cool. Thanks, interesting backgrounds so far. Tucker, you seem like the one who's probably sort of the most freshman at Harmonic, or are you? Definitely, yeah. I am just under a year. I think I'm at 10 months at Harmonic now. So I came from a background in health sciences. I actually studied rehabilitation science and assistive technology before I got into service design for my graduate degree. So I come from more of a product design background with some health sciences thrown in there. And then I switched over to service design and now I'm landed here at Harmonic. Awesome. Welcome in the community. Cool. Super diverse backgrounds. And I think that also paints the picture of what service design is or should be or could be and how service design teams look these days. So thank you for that. And let's jump into some of the questions from the community. And the first format that we have is finish the sentence. So I'm going to pose a question to you and then we'll take turns and just answer this as briefly and as quickly as possible. And I'm going to look down on my phone because that's where I have the questions prepared. And I'm going to start with you, Trayon. And then I'll mention who's next. So let's go. The first sentence that we have and then I'm going to invite you to finish is the way to effectively communicate the value of service design to new potential clients is? So I think, sorry, so I think the way to effectively communicate the value of service design to new clients is by doing and not talking. So in my experience, even, you know, at Harmonic and outside of Harmonic, I think we've dealt through that situation a few times. And, you know, when you're constantly trying to show the value of service design to clients big and small and across teams breaking silos. So I think it's more about, you know, striking the right balance between talking about it and showing them the value instead of just talking about the value that it could bring to them. Awesome. And I'm going to move on to the next one. Otherwise, your peers won't have anything else to add. Thanks, Trayon. Steven, how would you finish the sentence? Well, I think what Trayon said is absolutely right. If I don't have the luxury of showing them and I just have to talk to them, I found that the easiest way to convey the value is to point out examples where service design was not done on a service. Help them understand that our job is to remove that kind of pain and frustration. And we have a lot of examples where service design wasn't done, or at least not consciously. Thanks. Yeah. Gary, your turn. How would you finish the sentence? Well, very similarly, it's about doing, jumping in and doing. The other thing that I would actually say when I'm trying to communicate the value of service design is just intention. Intention around designing for services. And it's often overlooked, you know. Services, in my opinion, will kind of design themselves. And so I kind of position it that way as far as, especially those that are new to it, the return on investment is that you're taking that intention around services and designing for that. And so you could be reducing pain, reducing costs, those types of things. Right. Thank you. Dr, do you have anything to add to this? Yeah, all of those answers are great. I think the only extra thing I would add is it's just learning a little bit of their language and how they describe themselves and some of their processes. I think a large part of our work at Harmonic is just reorienting people to a service mindset and having this service orientation. So taking some time and understanding their language and how they talk about things so we can align and make sure we can make that transition into service design a little bit more seamless for them. Great. And if somebody is just listening right now, just make a summary of these four answers and then you'll have your way to actually communicate the value of service design. Awesome. Thank you. We have three more of these coming up later. But now it's time to jump into the first lightning round. And I'm going to start with Shreya. Five questions for you. And I wanted to set a timer to 90 seconds. Let me try to do that right now because the goal here is to answer them as quickly as possible. Timer 90 seconds. We should hear a nice ring. One minute 30 seconds. Shreya, are you ready? Yes, I am. All right. Clock is running. Now, first question is if you could switch roles with one of the people at Harmonic for a day, who would it be? I think that I would switch roles with our CEO Patrick because I think he gets to see a lot of things that we don't get to see like he oversees all the projects. It would be really interesting to switch roles with them. All right. Besides the possibility to work across multiple industries and companies, why should service designers work for an agency? I think apart from just having a view over working at different agencies or industries, I think being in an agency really helps you build a community of practice around and with the other practitioners that are working. So I think it has offered me a great opportunity to grow my practice. Great. What's the work you're most proud of? I think coaching gives me a lot of joy. I think Harmonic is moving very fast and nightly towards a coaching model. So I think any sort of coaching has given me joy in the past. And we'll continue to do so in the future. Cool. Question number four. Do you get to access the stakeholders and customers you need? Absolutely. I think we've been lucky in that sense, touch wood a little bit. We've been really lucky in getting hold of the stakeholders and customers that we have wanted to talk to. There are definitely adjustments that you have to make and work around some things. But for the most part, it has worked out well for us. Well, and that's the 90 seconds. Thank you, Shreya. You got to four out of five, which is a nice score. Let's see how far your colleagues get. So Shreya, we're going to slow down the pace a little bit and we're going to move into a deep dive round. You have a lifeline for the question that I'm going to pose. And if you want to involve some of your co-workers in this discussion, feel free to do so. But I'm going to start with you. And like I mentioned at the start, these questions are coming from the service design show community. People actually have asked these questions. So I'm just representing the voice of the community here. That's exciting. Let's do the deep dive. So the question here is what skills does someone need to demonstrate to work as a service designer at a company agency like Harmonic? That's a very good question, Mark, actually, because we do kind of look at, we have a successful in-tone program as well, where we're constantly looking for skills in a service design intern. So I would say, I think the biggest, the top thing for me or anyone who's looking to hire somebody is that passion for service design and that hunger to learn. I think what makes Harmonic really unique is that everybody has found their journey into service design, and everybody's really proud of it. They bring their own self and not try to just fit in to the culture that exists. So everyone has had a hand in building the culture at Harmonic. So, and I'm pretty sure that Stephen can talk a little bit more about that as well. But I think that is one of the biggest things. But I think that is one of the biggest things that we're always there for each other. We help each other out. So that growth to learn service design and grow your practice is one of the biggest skills that we look for. Stephen, you were already invited in the conversation and I want to sort of maybe articulate one thing. And that is, Shreya mentioned the passion for service design and passion for learning. I can imagine that somebody who wants to get into service design is really curious about how to demonstrate that. How do you show that? How do you see or find that in people? A passion for services? For service design? Yeah, for services maybe. How do you demonstrate that? I think a couple of different angles. One of them is showing a certain connoisseurship of services, being able to talk about things that you've experienced, services that you've received, where you've really appreciated it and seen the artistry. Also think curiosity about services, wondering what's going on under the hood when a service is delivered to you, being able to imagine what might be happening backstage to the front stage that you're experiencing. I think that's a couple of things. A connoisseur of services, I love that. We need to do something with that. That's just brilliant. Shreya, anything to add to what Steven just mentioned? Yeah, Ashley, I wanted to add another thing and just say that, yeah, I really echo with what Steven said. I think there is more to a person than just their portfolio and their work samples. And what we try to see is not how well polished the work is, but we try to see the thinking behind it. So we're trying to always evaluate if a person has a system's mindset and are they able to make those connections? Are they able to really zoom in and out? Back to my previous thing, yes, we're looking for people who are passionate and want to learn from us, but we also want to help people who have already developed or started having an interest in a system's mindset. And again, how do you see that? How do you recognize that in a person? I think it's more about not asking them to walk through each of the things that they have, but more like the vibe behind it. So every time they're walking through a project, it's about, okay, why did you do this? What would you do differently? How does this fit into the bigger outcomes that you set out to achieve? Where do you think you were not able to achieve certain outcomes? So it's a little bit of probing, but you eventually get there. Like if I can throw in an example, I had this person who did not have a portfolio and they, instead of a portfolio, submitted a write-up of the things that they had done in their past projects. There were no visuals to it, but I could clearly see their thinking in the words that they wrote about how they approached the project and what their thinking was. So it can, I think it can manifest in different forms. It doesn't always have to be visual, but I think being visual obviously gives you an edge, right? Well, you have a different means of communication and you can communicate things in a different way, but I think it's important that you highlight this, that there might be an overemphasis on visually appealing portfolios, while nobody said that that's a requirement for any service design professional. Yes, exactly. Like I would say it's a nice to have. It's definitely a skill that has helped me in the long run. So I would definitely encourage everyone to explore it and really have that skill, but I wouldn't say it's a mandatory thing to be able to become a service designer. Yeah, cool. Let's wrap it up at that. Thank you for the deep dive, Shreya. We'll get back to you with some other questions in a minute. But now I want to move on to our next finish the sentence format, finish the sentence chapter. And Turker, as you want last, I'm going to start with you. Otherwise, everybody will have taken your answer. So finish this sentence. The biggest misconception about service design is that it's just a way to inform UX design or product design. I think it's actually a perspective shift and a mindset shift that we need to focus on more. Got it. Gary, what would you say? I would say sometimes I think that there's a misconception that it's kind of a service design will solve that, right? And that it's like this oversimplification. And to be involved in service design takes some real perseverance and dedication and commitment. And so, yeah, it takes a lot of just dedication to the work overall. I think that could be a surprise at times. Okay. Yeah. Steven. Well, I know this misconception well because I had it for a long time before I figured this out, which is people confuse service design with omnichannel design. They forget the backstage and forget how important the designing the backstage is. So that I would say people think it's just simply applying human center design to services. And it's so much more complicated than that. We should communicate more about that in our own literature. Shreya, now you're up last. How would you finish the sentence? I think again, I think all great answers. I would say the biggest misconception is that service design can be only applied to services. I think that is one of the biggest misconceptions. Like I've seen it applied to a lot of different, you know, you could apply it to a single touch point in a service as well and use the thinking and the mindset to be able to design better for that. So I feel like service design is more universal than we think it is. Hmm. Okay. Cool. Thank you. Thank you for this round. And we have two more. And but now we're going to move into a lightning round. And the next participant will be Steven. Steven, I've got five questions for you from the community. And I added a few for myself here. Are you ready? Ah, I don't know. I'll know when you ask them. I'll know. Let's not forget to set the timer. 90 seconds starting now. Steven, describe harmonic in three words. A, nerds, paradise. Have you encountered questions from clients on measuring the return on investment of service design? And if so, how did you reply? Oh, no. We have run into them and we usually try to get the measurements from them. What needle would you like to move? And then we start working in reference to that. Awesome. What is it like to work with a famous best-selling author like Patrick? It's just constant surprise. You think that you know what he knows and then you hear him talk to someone else and realize you've barely seen the tip of the iceberg of that guy's knowledge. Okay, perfect. Why do agencies still require people to do design challenges? Do you support that? And if so, why? I'm not sure what you mean by that. Well, in the hiring process, when you do a design challenge, when you ask somebody to do an assignment. I guess desire for free work. Or just wanting to get a better sense of how an agency works rather than hearing how they talk about themselves. Yeah, cool. You got two four, which is apparently a good score. Thank you, Steven. But now it's your opportunity to do a deep dive with me. And the question I've got for you for the deep dive is, how do you get to know the full problem space when you're not based in-house? Well, the best you can. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to get inside it. Of course, one of them is asking them to back up a truck full of documentation. And we read it the best that we can. A lot of times, it's difficult to digest before you actually get to have conversations with your clients. So stakeholder interviews are very helpful, both as information in its own right, but also kind of a language lesson, learning how to get familiar with the way the client speaks. So that's a good starting point. But honestly, the understanding of the problem space happens throughout the entire project where we're learning all the way through. And hopefully our client learns with us as we go. What is the biggest challenge not being in-house? I guess when you're in-house, you are steeped in conversations all the time. You're hearing them go on in the halls. You're just immersed in it. You have a much better idea of the range of knowledge available in the organization. So you have a better idea of knowing when your information is complete. You have a map of what you don't know as well as what you do know. So I think you get a more holistic sense of what's available and what the state of knowledge is in your own organization. Gary, I'm curious if you hear this, sometimes knowing everything being on the inside is also a burden because it maybe limits the opportunities that you see. And it's harder to take on the beginner's mindset. How are you experiencing that? Being in in-house practice? Well, not being in-house practice. So being outside, which advantages do you see? I would say the biggest one is that outside perspective. So sometimes when you're in in-house practice, it's harder to see when it's that much closer. And I know that might not make much sense. But coming from the outside, we bring a fresh mind, fresh eyes. And I think one of the things that we really encourage in what is easy to happen when you're in-house is you really start to work from the inside. So you get a lot of, we're developing new offerings and we believe customers will love it. But then you discover that it's very self-referential. The outside perspective, we're able to facilitate the right conversations. So we can help them empathize and uncover what's really happening, both in the organization and for customers. Stephen, anything to add to that? I'd say a lot of the information that we have is almost meta-information. Like we start learning who knows what in the organization, rather than trying to be the ones who have it. We become the people who can be kind of the directory of who has it. So a lot of times what we learn about organizations is who to pull into the collaboration that can help inform it. What is your strategy there? How do you actually build that map and build those relationships? Who do you know, who to approach, when to approach? Well, at first we're asking other people and just kind of giving them a clear sense of the kinds of people that we need to pull in for various purposes. We have a list of types of people that we like to have in different types of workshops. But really over the course of the project, it's more just making friends with everyone and just getting a sense of what everyone knows and who can come in and help us out. Another thing that's important to know, I think in addition to who knows what, is also who in the organization is respected and has a certain amount of political credibility. Because a lot of what we're doing is pulling people together to develop solutions. And you want to make sure that when people hear that someone was involved in shaping a solution that that adds credibility to that solution. So it's more likely to be taken up and really used by the organization. It sounds like a very deliberate act to sort of build a mental model or maybe even a physical model of these power dynamics, these political dynamics. Is that something that you actually communicate with a client up front? Or is this something that you do just part of your day to day? It's part of our kickoff. A lot of times I will thank them for the people that are in our kickoff for being there and explain to them that it's important that we have their involvement and have this particular mix of people in the room because we need to have their lens for understanding the problem. We need their particular form of ingenuity. Where they'll see possibilities where no one else sees them, but also their representatives of their discipline. They are in a sense an endorsement of what we do. So we're pretty explicit about that, telling people that when service design problems involve a huge number of people, it requires a lot of different sources of faith. So we try to make the people involved in our projects aware of all the different kinds of things they're contributing to it. Yeah, and you do that by being very explicit about it right from the very get go. Right from the start, yeah. So if we had to summarize this, how do you get to know the full problem space? What would you say? I would say it's first of all, not believing that you are going to cram all the information inside your own cranium. You're going to try to create sort of a distributed information system and make sure that you have all the right people in the room who are able to contain this problem space. And the real task is to gain fluency, so you can translate between the different positions and get the entire extended team to work like a big single brain. Awesome, a big single brain. A big single brain that has the full, well, full, let's not get into what the full problem space is because that's probably never ending. Makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Steve, for going through this deep dive with me. All right, let's move over into the next finish, the sentence question we got from the community. And I'm going to start with you, Kari, right now. The question is, our strategy to find new clients is... The first word that really comes to mind are two words, relationship and partnerships. So, I think partially because of Patrick's reputation and the book, we certainly get people to different organizations connect with us. But these initial conversations are really open and honest and we're really trying to understand where is it that an organization might want to be. So, I'd say the strategy really is that relationship building from day one and trying to understand what they're seeking to solve or change. Well, note that one down. Stephen, what do you have to add to this strategy? It's not really an addition. I would just say word of mouth. I'll take that one. Shreya, what would you say? What is the strategy? I echo with what both of them said. I really resonate towards building relationships right off the bat. So, I'm going to go with just plus one in Keri on that. Fair enough. And Tucker, you're blessed again. What would you say? I might add this as a secondary, maybe not as a preliminary, but if it's an area of passion for any of our designers, I think Hermakta is something really unique of aligning our own personal and professional passions with the type of work that we want to do. So, if there's an area that we see as really fruitful for a place of our designers to go in and do some of the work that they're passionate about, we'll make that happen as well. Like getting on podcasts. Yeah. Thank you for this. Thank you for this. We've got one finish the sentence question round coming up at the end. And now it's time to do a lightning round. And in this case, I'm going to move to Keri. Five questions for you. Let's see if you get to five. Ninety seconds. I'm going to restart the timer. There we go. It's running. So, the first question I've got for you, Keri, is if you could change one thing about Hermakta, what would it be? Oh, good question. If we could change one thing, I would just say, and we're always constantly working on this, deepening our practice, growing our practice. Okay, okay. What's the ratio between projects that are implemented and projects that remain in the early stages? That really depends. Depends on the depth and length of the initiative, but we do take it all the way through and we have a number of projects that are in the implementation stage. Okay. What's the most challenging part about your work? Let's see, the most challenging part of my work, of our work as service designers, I would say really, we're at a really interesting time where service design is still really new to a lot of organizations. So, they're engaging in service design projects, initiatives, but they're not used to working maybe holistically or across functions. And so, we are, to some of the points made earlier, constantly working to build relationships inside the organization, connect with stakeholders, work across boundaries that maybe in the past might be really hard silos. And that was your 90 seconds? Oh, right, I got that too. I can second that. That's definitely a hard part of our work. The deep dive question is definitely related to this and let me read it out loud. So, this was a question again from the community and the way it goes is, I would love to hear more about how you scope a project. Could you illustrate a specific example of a project you have done in the past? Yeah, let me, let's just talk with scope from the beginning. And I think we talked about, mentioned this a little earlier, those very, very early conversations are essential, right? So, we're trying to really understand what is it when someone connects with us in an organization, what is it that you're setting out to solve for? Where is it that you want to be? And really get a gauge and initial understanding on that, really understanding their readiness to actually do the work, right? And so, I think it really is about tailoring to what an organization is seeking to solve for initially. That's really what it's about. So, it's definitely, I think the one thing that Harmonic does really well is it's, there's no, it's not a cookie cutter approach, right? We really, really want to understand where is it that you want to be? I can imagine that that's quite challenging then to sort of define the scope. Yes and no. I think that we're trying to also get people or organizations comfortable with, you know, some level of, you know, here's what you're seeking to solve and the way there might change along the way. And we try to make it so that there could be an emergent practice around what they're trying to achieve. So, I think that that is the biggest piece of it is just getting them a little bit more comfortable with, you know, the scope might actually change, you know, depending on how we reframe the problem. And how do you do that? Because that sounds like magic. Every client wants to know upfront, like, what will we get at the end? Like, how long will it take? How much is it going to cost? Like, when will it be ready? How do you get them to embrace this level of emergence and uncertainty? Yeah, I think that that's a great question. You know, starting with the sketch and being very clear at the very beginning about what the process might look like, right? And understanding what progress might look like towards the outcome. And again, constantly having those conversations to help people become comfortable with, you know, we could set different milestones, but also reinforcing the fact that it may change depending on what we discover. I'm curious about the pushback you get, but maybe there's somebody on the team who might comment on pushback. What do you think could comment on pushback, Gary? Oh, I think anyone on the team could probably take that. Shreya, would you like to comment on pushback? Sure. Can you tell me specifically what you're looking for? Can you repeat the question for me? Yes. Yeah, yeah, well, so if Gary mentions that getting clients comfortable with this way of working, is that in milestones that might change, I can imagine that you'll, not everybody, will embrace this open-heartedly. Yeah, no, I think it's a part and parcel of every project. In my opinion, I think it comes with every project. I think it's important to really realize where there is a little bit of flexibility in what you're trying to achieve and where are some fixed goals. So I think I see it as here are things that we are setting out to achieve. We have to achieve these specific goals that we are for sure after, and then leaving some sort of leeway or some sort of flexibility in terms of where we go with the rest of them. I think it's also like a constant checking and rechecking of those milestones and also readjusting them, in my opinion. So could you give an example? Like what is the thing that you know that you're going to deliver upon? What are some of those fixed things that you can give a level of comfort and sort of predictability for clients who are seeking that? I think a lot of the business outcomes kind of align towards that when you're looking at journeys, if the work is connected and if the work that you are delivering is kind of connected to the next piece of work that is already lined up, those aren't some non-negotiable things that you're definitely going after. But if there are things that are nice to have in a project, those could still be taken as, okay, it is going to be awesome if we achieve these. If not, let's find alternative ways to see or obtain value out of the engagement. Gary, anything to add to what Rayo just said? Yeah, I definitely will kind of plus one that is, again, identifying what are the, there could obviously be some definite goals that an organization can be going after. Maybe it is, for example, they know that they have a high cost and there's high service recovery and part of the experience that their customers are having. And perhaps one of the things they're really after is reducing the costs related to all the service recovery. And so we could really pinpoint those things. But at the same time, it is tricky and challenging because we use a lot of generative research and we're really trying to unearth the real need and get at what is it that we really, really have to address. There could be, that could be packed with a lot of surprises. So from that and learning from that, sometimes we kind of reshape what those goals might end up looking like. What kind of clients does it take to do these kind of projects? What kind of clients does it take to do these kind of projects? That is a big question. I know. So let me, let me re, sorry, let me rephrase it. Yeah. What is the first thing you look for in a client? Oh, okay. I love that question. What is the first thing you look for in a client? You know, I think the thing that really stands out for me that is really, really essential and important is this kind of hunger to make things better, right? To improve an experience, to innovate a new service and how far an organization is willing to lean in, especially because this is the new, right, to the new. And it could be really, really uncomfortable. So looking for companies who are ready to just really step in and work side by side, I think is, is huge. It's essential. It's really essential. Thanks. It makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like great clients who have that attitude, definitely worth the investment of spending the time to honing in on them. Thank you for this deep dive, Kerry. We have finished the sentence question lined up for you. And this is going to be sentence number four. Let me open it over here. Yes. And we already touched upon this a little bit, but it's also different. Stephen, I'm going to start with you for this one. Yes, you can unmute. There we go. The most fun part about my work is the insights that come from research, having those breakthroughs that you could not have had if you hadn't had that group of people in the room talking to these people involved in the service. Yeah. Awesome. Shreya, what would you say? I would say collecting from a recent experience, I think for stakeholders to be listening to the customer's voice, I think that is very rewarding for me. Thank you. Tucker, what about you? What is the most fun part about your work? I often see a direct translation of the stuff I'm working on, the designs I'm working on, and my own personal life. As a recent example, we just got off of a client and working around behavioral science. And at the end of it, I am now reconsidering how much meat I eat, and my environmental impact on most of my decisions that I do throughout the day. So I think that's something that, as designers, and especially as service designers, we often don't talk about how it affects our own personal identities. And I see that every day in our work can re-evaluate myself in a system. Definitely after a hard day of work. It's not just professional growth, but it's personal growth as well. Yeah. Kari, what about you? What is the most fun part about your work? Well, I'll definitely echo what everyone shared, but what Tucker shared. I think that you start to look at things a little bit different, or you kind of have this heightened awareness of services when you're out in the world and how important they are. I would say one of the real rewarding pieces of this work is when we're working with organizations, and you have kind of, I don't know what I would call it, like a aha moment, right? And you're getting people to work together who may not have ever had the opportunity to work together, and they're starting to kind of orient themselves around potential impossibility of creating a new experience. And I think that that is really, really rewarding. It's to hopefully people have a better day at work because they're coming together to design for a better experience. Beautiful. Thanks, Kari, for this. This concludes round number four of The Finish, The Sentence. And we've got a lightning round and a deep dive left with Tucker. Also, five questions lined up for you. Let me go to the timer. Are you ready, Tucker? Yeah, I'm going to try and hit all five. No one's done it yet today. Yes, let's do it. Question number one. Who's your favorite co-worker? Oh, boy, controversial. My favorite co-worker is... I've worked actually a lot with Steven and we have a lot of differences in the way we think, but he's also helped me explore services sign in a really philosophical way. And that has been really eye-opening to me. Steven, you're my favorite. Got it. Sorry. Tucker, what's the biggest failure you've made in a project? Biggest failure? I would say not considering some of the other implications outside of the actual design that we're working on. I am such a new designer and such a young designer in this field that sometimes I get caught up in the design components of our project and less so of maybe the business components. And that's just not where an area of strength I have right now. And I'm trying to practice that a little bit more. But I would say, yeah, that might be an area that I want to improve a little bit more in translating that over to our clients. Yeah, fair enough. Quickly moving on. Why did you decide to apply at Harmonic? I decided to apply about a year ago now to this day. I am actually based in DC. I'm not based in Atlanta. And I came from some of the design consultancies around here. Had heard about Harmonic for a couple of years now and had a couple of colleagues. Shreya was actually someone I went to grad school with. So I had heard really great things. And luckily the stars kind of aligned with timing that I could take over a position here. Cool. You made it to three. That's a lesson for the next Ask Me Anything group that I'll be doing. Let's see if we can get to five. But Tucker, we have a deep dive left for you. Which you have some more time to answer. Yes, and this is a very interesting one. I would love to get your perspective on this one. So sort of the question or the comment is companies are investing in in-house design teams. What is the future of agencies? Will agencies be still relevant in the future? Yeah. So I think as design matures in some of these organizations, they are starting to build these teams and realize it's probably a saving them a lot of more money to invest in these internal design teams. I think something that Harmonic does and helps us in the future is one of our core values is pushing our practice, like Kerry said earlier. And I think something that I see as agencies evolve in the future. And as service design matures in the U.S. particularly, we are going to be utilized more in pushing the practice and understanding how to take some of these high level complexities of service design theory and really push them with our clients. So I see us more maybe as pushing the boundaries of service design in the future. And I think there's a lot of areas still open to explore in service design. And I think these agencies that are connected to a lot of partners and clients have a really ripe territory of being able to pull from a lot of different industries and push practice in that way. Pushing the practice. Steven, I sort of feel that you also have a perspective on this. Would you, what would you add? Yeah, I mean, I would build on what Tucker just said. The good thing about being in an agency is you see a lot of different kinds of organizations with very different cultures and different ways of doing things. And you see a wide variety of problem types. And so you end up becoming kind of an encyclopedia of approaches and you have a lot to draw on. So one of the things I think people from agencies bring to other organizations that hire them is just a breadth of experience. Tucker, any comments on that? No, I think that's a really good way to summarize it. I think our skills are being able to translate what we're seeing in other industries, other types of problems, and making those connections with our clients. So being able to have that bank of experience in our background is going to be really helpful. And I think that will take us through the next couple of years, hopefully, of being profitable. So yeah, maybe a related question to this. So if that's not the thing that in-house teams are going to sort of take over anytime soon, pushing the practice, maybe to some sort of extent, what do you feel is the thing that in-house service design teams would be able to take over? Yeah, I think something that we've been talking about at Harmonic recently is how to scale service design. And that doesn't just mean scaling the services that they offer to larger and larger populations, but it really means scaling that mindset, the service design perspective throughout the whole organization. And I think that's something that in-house designers, we can really lean on them. I don't see agency designers and in-house designers as opposites. I think that they can leverage some of their skills of being in-house and having that expertise and being able to really scale that service design mentality throughout an organization in a way that we can't do when we're just seeing them a couple of hours during a week. So I think we'll lean on them in the future. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. They're there like five days a week, nine hours a day, and they have much more influence potentially. And much more stamina, much more patience probably compared to an agency perspective. So there's definitely a future for agencies. That's what I'm concluding from your answer. Is that correct? Yeah, maybe I'm just an optimist being so young, but I hope there's a future in agencies. In some way or form. Okay, thanks. This actually concludes the four deep dives that we had. While we were talking, I just actually came up with a fifth, finished the sentence round sort of as a bonus round and let's do this really briefly. So my question for you is, which podcast or book would you recommend to any service design professional out there? And let's start with you, Shreya. Which book or podcast would you recommend? I mean, honestly, I think I would definitely recommend Patrick's book, but it goes without saying, because I think even when I hadn't joined Harmonic, it gave me a good practical way to apply service design while I've seen a lot of other books are more around the theory as much as I want to learn about theory. Sometimes you really want to dig deep and really know about, okay, but how do I do this? So I feel like that book does a good job at breaking that down. So still that my favorite book has been that, but if I had to go just like recommend something else, I would say the Experience-Centric Organization has been a really good book for me recently. And what's the title of Patrick's book? Orchestrating Experiences. Yes, well, I'll add a link to the show notes. Thank you, Shreya. Steven, what would you recommend? Well, I'll tell you the book, I keep recommending to people on my teams and it's not a service design book. It's a philosophy of design book, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. People use the phrase paradigm shift a lot and a lot of times people don't know where that came from. It came from that book. Part of the reason I recommend it so often is service design is itself a pretty serious paradigm shift even within human-centered design, which is itself a paradigm shift. But also a lot of times what we're trying to affect at organizations is itself a paradigm shift. We're trying to get them to think about the service they provide in a radically different way. And Structure of Scientific Revolutions really shows how that process works. So that's the one. Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Yeah, it's a classic, very good. It's not on my bookshelf yet, but it's definitely coming. Thank you for the recommendation, Steven. Carrie, what about you? Well, I will kind of plus one what Shreya shared. I think the experience-centric organization is a really good book to dive into, definitely. I think the other book that I would recommend is actually a book called Brave New Work and they also have an associated podcast. I think that we sometimes talk about the boundaries of design and we have all these different disciplines. Service design touches on so many things. And to do service design is to be working on organizational effectiveness or organizational performance at the same time. So I like Brave New Work because it kind of brings in system thinking, kind of very practical around thinking about what kind of experiments can you run and how you work together. Because so much of designing for services is dependent on that. Thank you, Brave New Work. We'll add a link to the show notes. And finally, Tokar, what would you add to the list of recommendations? Yeah, Steven does a really great job because he sends me a lot of book recommendations, including Scientific... Gosh, I already forget the name. That's why, yes. It's on the bookshelf back there. But the one that I keep coming back to and since I've started with service design is the Design Philosophy Reader. I think this is a really good book. It is dense in some areas. Philosophy isn't always the easiest thing to read, but I think it helps us understand some of the why behind the designs that we build and we implement and we create together with other people. And I think that's a really important question to understand as designers is what is the philosophy behind design and why are we doing this? Certain things that we're doing. Is it innate? Is it something that's just meant for humans to do? So I think touching back on time to time, I wouldn't recommend reading through all this book at once and going out into the world and trying to recap everything that you learned. But I think touching back to this book is really helpful as a designer. For if somebody is listening to the podcast version of this recording, you showed the cover of the reader and it's actually quite worn. So which is a good sign, I guess. Perfect. Those were some very useful recommendations and I'll make sure to add everything in the show notes. I guess this wraps up our Ask Me Anything sort of kind of a service design show episode. This was a first and experiment. I hope that you enjoyed it. I did for sure. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing and giving us a little bit of an insight what it's like to be a service design professional at a leading service design agency in the States. Pretty cool to get that insight. I'm sure there's so much more to share but we'll keep that for a different moment. So Shreya Tucker, Stephen, Kerry, thank you for coming on. I want to give a huge thanks to the Harmonic Design Team for coming on to the show and sharing so openly with us. It's great to have them as a partner and see their commitment for helping to grow this community, not just in words, but also in actions. I'm always looking for more brave companies who actively want to support our field. If that sounds like you, let's have a chat about how we can partner. Send an email to mark at servicedesignshow.com and let's take it from there. Finally, if you want to know more about Harmonic Design or the people who appeared on this episode, check out the links in the show notes. My name is Mark Fontijn and I want to thank you for tuning in to the Service Design Show again. I'll catch you very soon in the next episode.