 Hi, I'm Mark, and welcome to this very special episode of the Service Design Show. This episode is fully dedicated to in-house service design. You're going to hear about some of the specific challenges in how service designers face and also get some advice on how to be more successful as an in-house service designer. But before we dive into the stories that we're going to share, I want to give you the background story of how this episode came to be. So there's no denying that more and more organizations are building their internal design capabilities, and that means that in-house service design is growing very fast. Being an in-house service designer is completely different than working in an agency or a consultancy. For instance, when you're in-house, it's often difficult to find people who share the same passion, have the same background and use those people as peers to get feedback, to challenge your ideas, to basically level up your skills. And also, when you're an in-house service designer, you're often seen as the expert, the person who needs to know and have all the answers. But sometimes you don't know if you're doing things right and you don't have somebody around you who you can talk to and share ideas with, which is completely different from an agency where you're surrounded by people who you can talk to. So to do something about this, I started a group this summer, which I called the campfire sessions. So what are the campfire sessions? Well, the campfire sessions or the campfire, as we tend to call it, is a small group of eight in-house service designers from different countries, different organizations, and we create a space where we can meet on a regular basis to exchange ideas, get advice, and share the challenges we or they face in this case. And I'm really excited as we've just finished the first round of these campfire sessions and I'm going to introduce you to Kari, Jacqueline and Rachel, who were part of this experience. They're all in-house service designers from very different organizations. And in a minute they're going to share with you what are some of the specific challenges in-house service designers face and how you can be more successful as an in-house service designer. So like I said, we just finished the first round of these campfires. The next round is starting very soon. At the end of this episode, I'll tell you how you can join and I want to be very clear, upfront that there is an application process as we've just got space for eight people in the group. So if you're interested in joining, make sure you stick around till the very end of this episode. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Kari, Jacqueline, Rachel and myself. Let the show begin. Hey everybody. Hi. Hey. Good to see you back all in this smaller edition of the Campfire. Let's do a quick introduction round and maybe you want to start Jacqueline. Sure. My name is Jacqueline Briehu. I am a service design manager at Shopify. I've been there for about two and a half years. I was the first service design hire that they had sort of the first explicit sort of service design hire. There are several folks internally practicing, but I've worked remotely for Shopify since I started. So a lot of what we've had to do lately is a lot of sort of remote collaboration and doing virtual services line. And I have a small team and I currently work within the support organization. I live in Northern Virginia in the United States and I'm, I'll stop there. Sorry, there's construction. Thanks. Kari, how about you? Sure. So I'm Kari Oyenin. I'm the practice lead of interaction and service design at RBC Royal Bank of Canada. Live in Toronto, Canada. And I've been with RBC for just a little bit less than five years now. Started in a different role in a hands-on role when the team was just really kind of forming. Things were quite out of hog. I was a product design lead at first and then been in the practice lead role for the last two and a half years or so. Our team as a whole is the digital design team. There's 170 of us on the team. I have about 40, 42 people sort of under me as the interaction and service designers. And I myself with a number of colleagues we formed the design operations team. So there's a few practice lead roles and a couple of other roles that are part of that group. Awesome. So we have Shopify, we have Bank. Rachel, let's cross the ocean. How about you? Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Rachel Liu. I'm based in the UK working for Pearson Education. It's actually just over my third year anniversary. It was on the 19th. So I started actually as part of the user experience team as a lead there. And service design has been a new practice that I've been building for the last just under two years in January. So it's been kind of a really small but more leaner kind of way where our team in London was started from three of us and now it's 14. And we're still kind of growing that practice to have more leaner new ways in a more of an agency kind of model. So we look at different projects to kind of try and to make things a bit more human centered but looking beyond products and looking at a service like what does education look like as a service to our learners and wider stakeholders. Education as a service. Awesome. So we were with a bigger group but we focused this session on the conversation with the three of us. Now when I came up with the idea of the campfires it literally, it was an idea that I had for I don't know over a year for sure. And on a Friday afternoon I was just like I need to just do this. Let's make it into a prototype. Send out an email, post it on LinkedIn and to my surprise some of you replied and send in a really awesome message telling me that I wanna be part of this first experiment. Now I'm really curious what was the thing that appealed to you to the campfires? Because there weren't any campfires. Well, there were campfires but not the in-house service design campfires that we were going to organize. Like what attracted you in this? Anyone, Jacqueline, wanna comment on that? Sure, yeah, I think so this is the second time I've built a sort of been the first service designer in with an organization in-house. I've actually always been in-house even as a product designer before getting into the service design. So I was at Capital One first which is where I kind of got into service design and then Fannie Mae where I built that out and then now Shopify. And the idea of being able to chat with other folks who were trying to scale service design in-house was very attractive. There's a lot, I mean from the campfires thus far it was very validating that a lot of some of the things that I've been struggling with mostly in terms of just organizational change that we sort of need to happen in order to really enable good service design practice to happen and to accelerate the impact. But it was just really, I think it was appealing to just chat with folks and to hear other stories from folks who are specifically in-house which I think a lot of the articles that are published online and the blog posts and the stories a lot come from consultants. And that's obviously just as valid in terms of service design as a practice but it's sort of when you take the practice and then you put it in the context of an in-house team I think it's very nuanced and it's just been great to chat with other folks. How about you, Rachel? What was the thing that made it interesting for you to reach out? Very similar actually. So I've worked both in-house and in-agency but the most interesting one about the in-house perspective is that firstly, not many people know about it the lack of awareness and not many people in-house actually talk about it either maybe they don't have time or capacity to actually have the chance to reflect. So I think that was really a nice invitation for you to kind of go, let's try this, let's be open with this. So I think that curiosity kind of went, oh wow, it's a great opportunity to learn from other people. And my first service design hire who was a contractor he came from an agency background so it was really fresh perspective to bring in but I wanted to have both kind of seeing what is it like for another in-house but also what is it like for that agency to model. Gary, anything you wanna add to that? Similar things. I was looking forward to hearing at least I made the assumption that I would hear I have the opportunity to hear from a global perspective that would be people in this group from across the globe, right? And I grew up and started my career in Europe and so I have a personal interest in that service design is still quite new in Canada. I wouldn't say it's not even so much in terms of there's awesome people, practitioners here, a couple agencies even really great groups, service design Canada is a national group that's doing really, really good work and that has been going for a while but in terms of how it is within organizations and how it is in-house it's really just up and coming and even product design in a sense is still kind of up and coming and so folks are excited about that just about shipping product as we've talked about it already covered that in many ways and so I was looking forward to just getting those perspectives from different parts of the world and from different people in-house and the other aspect they think is just COVID the lack of connections, how nice this is and how people have, I think we've all in a different way kind of seized this opportunity now too. I mean, we have our meetings remotely on video then why not also have these kinds of groups and these kinds of use these kinds of opportunities to come together across the wider fields of the process. Yeah, I can really relate to what you're all saying and sort of it's nice to see that some of the ideas that I started out with actually come out into play especially what you also said, Rachel that taking time to reflect is something usually people don't do, they're just busy working and I think these campfires are also just an excuse to give you a permission to stand still and reflect on what you're doing and also just listen rather than having to be to have all the answers all the time. So really nice to hear that you also experienced it in that way. You already touched upon this but I would love to hear your take on what do you feel are some of the challenges that are specific to in-house service design? Anybody wanna start? I'll jump in. So I was actually thinking about this and I was like, oh, I wish I had said this earlier but I think there can be so many unique ways that organizations can be so unique in terms of their cultures, based on who started the company, its history, its transformation over time or its evolution and so much of that sort of DNA is embedded within the culture and that sort of creates this environment that you have to understand in order to deliver sort of like value with your service design and it's a very cryptic way of getting at like, so at Shopify, for instance, we try to build a lot in-house. If there's a third-party product, we're like, oh, well, let's just build it in-house, we'll do it ourselves and the same thing goes with consultants and service delivery. So it was like, when I started out as a team of one, my unique challenge was that this was not a company that likes bringing external consultants on board and so I couldn't sort of do a staff augmentation through a consultant model. It was about having to be really scrappy and resourceful and spending a lot of time educating people about service design and trying to shift mindsets. That was almost like the first milestone was like, okay, how do I get people to think differently and how do I shift our process from one that is, oh, we're all experts internally and we know what the market needs and we're just gonna like ship things and we'll test and learn once it's in market. It's sort of, we're an exceptional company at shipping product and features, like if you're a product designer and you wanna work on something that's actually in market, we excel at that and I think it's great but from a service perspective, coming on board, I was taken back a little about how much room we had for progress in terms of our research methodology and the rigor that we could apply to it. And so the unique thing that I've been faced with is like I can't bring on external consultants. There's sort of a like, you have to show value in order to get more headcount but in order to deliver that value, you kind of need, I like the notion of like, the material of service design is the organization and so we have to kinda like, I have spent a lot of time trying to shift the organization to create the foundation upon which we can practice, good service design and we can change these outcomes for humans in our ecosystem. And it's been a long journey of just trying to get there and what was helpful with the campfires chatting with other folks who, where we have some similarities, like some folks were able to bring on external consultants since that was different from my experience. And so hearing about that and how that may have helped them or hindered things or probably helped to demonstrate value faster, whereas it's taken me longer to demonstrate value because I've had these restrictions but even to hear others who've had similar experiences, it's just, it's validating that we're like, okay, we are all trying, you hear some, the trends start to emerge about the need for good data collection or the need for rigorous research or to help people think differently and what we're all doing in terms of visibility or process, you know, it's just there's been strategies along the way that I think we've all shared, so yeah. A lot of internal challenges that are specific to it's different than working at a consultancy or an agency. What's your experience, Rachel? What have you found as specific challenges for in-house service designers? I think from the group level, it was really interesting that everyone had quite a different starting point based on where they fitted in the organization. So where does service design even belong, where you start, right? And you have to work within those constraints. I found it super interesting that everyone that we talked to here had just really different starting points. Whereas I guess from my perspective, I had to start really small. So I think service design could be quite overwhelming because it could be quite big, that you know, changes has to be at a scale or we have that vision, we want things better and things to be seamless. But where's the starting point? And I think we can almost be over and that's for me as well. How to build a smaller like allies or building up that trust, working with our stakeholders. And actually I decided not to use service design, the word, it's a word that maybe people don't understand, that becomes a barrier itself. It's actually looking at where the business kind of vision is, which is trying to make learners have better learning outcomes, you know kind of thinking in terms of bringing that business aspect into it, which I never did before. I was so focused on the users perhaps and championing their voices first, that I kind of have to then look at a more balanced view and that kind of balance holistic view of both the business side and the learners has actually helped a lot. So that was my I guess a big learning curve that I kind of uncovered with my own reflections. So that's been super interesting. How about you, Gary? And you've got a whole team, so I'm sure you have very specific service design challenges. Yeah, you know, working in a very large corporation, there's 85,000 people globally and there's a lot of history obviously, it's an industry that's well established and or definitely thinks that it's well established and hundreds of years of history in terms of financial services and lots of silos, very, very siloed. You know, things that you can expect, even if you don't work inside a huge organization yourself right now, you can probably expect and assume those kinds of things. And there's a lot to it that's all kind of internal. That's not to be in any way negative or nasty about it, but it's a game in and of itself, right? There's a lot of politics. There's a lot of kind of that corporate structure and things moving that you gotta kind of fit in that. We do use consultants, but with that, there's kind of this idea almost culture that new ideas come from consultants. They don't get to go very deep into the culture necessarily, but that's why you might hire consultants or a group of consultants that they would inject something into the organization that would kind of change things. Now, it makes things difficult, I think challenging for someone trying to work from the inside as part of that corporate workforce to change things and to get by and to get that, to even have people around you, around me kind of accept me as someone who could be a change maker from within and collaborate with people to make that change. That's hard. Usually there's the idea that it comes from the outside. It's interesting, like you're almost at the other extreme spectrum from Jacqueline like bringing in consultancies in your case is like, I don't know, getting invalidation or credibility and yeah, on the other hand, there is no totally no room to get any consultancy in. Interesting, and I've seen the different flavors of this throughout the campfire, so that was super interesting. Now, there are hopefully a lot of people listening who are in a situation where they recognize your stories, feel, I wanted to say feel the pain, but feel the situations. And I'm curious like, what is your biggest piece of advice? And I know we need to generalize here, but if you can give one piece of advice for an in-house service designer, what would it be? And let's do the wrong Robin as we just did because it works fine. So Jacqueline, how about you? I don't know if I could put it into one, but I know that. I know. Okay, so the thing in hindsight, maybe the advice is if you're the first person, whether it's service design or anything that's new to an organization, is to really, I hope that interviewing processes and hiring and all that, that you really get a chance to understand the organization that you're going to be doing this within. I think that's my advice is early on, understand, like there are, I think I took for granted at Fannie that we got to use consultants because I was able to show value so much faster and that's been a real limitation thus far. And I think, and I didn't think to ask, oh, do you use external consultants? So, you know, anyway, so my advice would be that if you're doing new, if you're the first person doing something in-house to really understand the organization and do all you can to chat with folks. How would you do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got this experience. What would you do different in understanding in our organization? Yeah, I mean, along the, you know, I would prepare questions. I think I often wing things. So I probably winged all my interviews, you know, but in, you know, and I think that that can be fine if that's the way you roll, but in hindsight, I think it was almost a disservice to me in not preparing certain questions in advance that would have helped me understand a bit of the context that I was entering into, you know, a bit of the culture. You know, look at blog posts, look at things that people have published online, authors from internal, authors from within, anyone who's sharing stories, reach out to people on LinkedIn, ask them for, you know, virtual hanging out to just chat about their experience some more. Yeah. Yeah, this is going to be the next article that we're going to publish on service design jobs, which will be about asking the right questions during a service design job interview. And I'm going to invite you to help me out and check in and the rest of the service design community. This will be a really interesting one. It's critical. It is. Yeah, yeah, we'll get back to that for sure. Rachel, how about you? Piece of advice. What would you say to yourself? Looking back? We'll just add on the sign that mark with the whole hiring. It'd be interesting what does that look like for hiring virtually and onboarding? So that's the question that I have in mind. But yeah, my advice is to find the allies to build trust with because actually they will help you talk about things and share things. And that's actually really impactful. That's a way of showing value. So there's a value of like obviously doing the work and demonstrating and problem solving to say, yes, it's possible, you can do it. But then there's the whole, actually, it's that building trust part, which is super critical. And that's something that I found in hindsight. And I only do things in hindsight when I reflect and I only reflect if I do talks. And that was one of the things was a reoccurring theme in the last two years, I would say. So what's a good strategy to build allies? Well, you mentioned earlier, listen, really pay attention to what are their needs? What are they kind of feel for all? And try to guide them and support them, be that kind of coach for them. So it's not like telling them what to do is finding them ways and opportunities to see things differently. Because we all have our own ways of seeing and sometimes we are not aware of it. So instead of spending that energy being created, it's finding the novelty of ways. And it could be as simple as inviting them to choose something so they can be a mess in it. They can see it, they can experience it. Whether that's just even talking to an interview and they're being an observer, they can then talk about it afterwards. So getting involved in the process itself, obviously. And yeah, it's really cool because Jacqueline, you said the organization is the design material, which I totally agree with. Kari, you said it's a game and now you're talking about making allies. So I feel like we're sort of demystifying what's going on here. Kari, what would your tip be for people trying to create change as in-house service designers? How can they be more successful? Yeah, my first thought is to put it into two words that both start with the same letter. So I would say patience, but also passion. Patience in the sense that things do take time in-house, working in-house, working in a large organization, it's gonna take time, change takes time, change is hard. Cultural change is hard, change in terms of mindsets, change in terms of approaches, all of that does take time. You won't get that change at least in my experience though only through patience and only through sort of patiently working through these things and expecting that then incrementally one day it's gonna happen. So that's what you need passion for. You need that passion to kind of get you through those hard moments and hard days and times when you feel like, hey, just as I was sharing in my story last time, at least the key takeaway from it that I meant was to say that I've experienced how you can do something, get something done and feel like that got done right. And yet it hasn't actually really caught on, it hasn't really led to so much. And that's exactly a big part of my experience in a big organization. You do need those allies, you do need kind of people who can almost be, if you get them to be your allies, if you get them to be kind of the people who understand you and work with you, then they can sort of start to be ambassadors to start bringing that message into other pockets and silos of the organization. You gotta go let go of your own goals. Like I came in, I'm the kind of person probably comes in with a lot of my own, this is what I wanna do. This is the change that I know that is important and this is what I want to make happen. But in again, in this kind of organization, people around you, they already have their goals, they already have their task lists are full, words, again, the game, there's incentives, there's bonuses that get paid in a certain way and stuff. They know that, they may say, I know what you're getting at, it sounds good, I know my boss won't at the moment reward me for that though. So I'm not gonna go with you or that's just not gonna be the stuff that I focus on because it actually doesn't get me further in how things are currently. So allies and a lot of patience and a lot of passion. Yeah, there was one recurring theme through the campfires, like you have to be a little bit crazy to be an in-house service designer. You have to have so much patience, passion, perseverance. It's definitely not something that is instantly rewarding and instant gratification that you probably should be looking for a different kind of role. So I'm really curious, we'll be continuing our chats in the campfires, either in video calls and in the WhatsApp group that we have. But I'm really curious, if we would stop now and you had to look back on the campfires, like in a year's time, what is the thing that you think you'll remember? Designing for the remembering self. Jacqueline, how about you? Yeah, I mean, I think community is something I value tremendously and I think it's one of my core values and for me, I think the thing that I will remember I guess is just the openness and the humility and the sort of general support that we all felt, there are a lot of folks just sharing really helps us have these rich conversations and so I'll look back and we've definitely formed some great relationships as a result of this and I think as I move forward, these are folks that I will turn to, to sort of just bounce ideas off of them as well as do a sanity check and I think we'll all be, I think because it was sort of an intimate group, I think it allows us to get a little bit sort of closer with one another so there is a bit of, you know, I think we all kind of have a certain degree of concern for one another wanting to make sure that we're all successful and that we all are able to do. It's like saying, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think you put it well, it can be a very challenging space to enter into. I think that's why different companies are at different maturity levels with it and service design lives in different facets of the organization and all of that matters, leveling, titling, I mean, people say, oh, it's just semantics, but you know, these things, all of the variables within an organization can all affect how service design plays out and this community has helped us sort of highlight a lot of those variables and what happens. How about you, Rachel? I would say connection and inspiration. I think it's giving us the space to share those kind of stories which we wouldn't really talk about. I think on a day-to-day it's not like we kind of grab someone and kind of deep dive in depth and uncover a story in so much ground in such a short amount of time. So yeah, I kind of treasure that kind of moment and knowing that that isn't our, that permission to dedicate ourselves that time to do that. So yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, my pleasure. And it was extremely rewarding to see that so that this group was so open and so willing to share, I think that was a huge part of the success. Anything you wanna add to that, Kari? You had a different shorter experience with the group but maybe still anything that you'll remember in a year time? Yeah, unfortunately, a much shorter experience but still very similar things, I think. Similar points as Rachel and Jacqueline. I, design is such a wild, well, wild, wide, I meant to say, field now. Maybe both. Both, yeah, for sure. And so, I definitely feel I can be in a room full of designers and but as I focus on services and how to look at a service and how to improve a service and service designs specifically, it's been just really good to be in this group where right from the first moment and even in the short experience that I've had, you know that you're with a group of people who have similar focuses you do and they're battling with many of the same challenges and just they kinda get to you and so it really opens you, opens me up quickly. I feel like I can share things and people will more easily connect with that than perhaps sometimes my colleagues at work or in some other form around design, what would happen? Yeah, if I look back at this now in hindsight, I think we sort of got the opportunity to get a peek into the journey that everybody's on and everybody's in a different stage of the journey but sort of heading in a similar direction and it's nice to learn about where somebody is and the challenges that they have faced and how they have overcome them or not and what drives somebody to do something. So yeah, I think we sort of, everybody's on a journey and we gotta peek into that. I'm going to continue the conversation with Kerry, Jacqueline and Rachel in the campfire group that we started. But like I said, at the beginning of this episode, we're also starting a very new campfire group and that's starting on October 12th. If this is something you're interested in joining, this is how you can apply. Send me a video where you share or answer three questions. Tell something about you yourself, yourself that's the same, you, your team and your organization. Tell something about the challenges that you face as an in-house service designer and the third thing is telling something about when the campfires would be a success for you. What's also really important is that you can commit five consecutive Mondays starting October 12th for one hour at 4 p.m., Central European time because that's when we're going to do our campfire group sessions. The deadline for the application is October 4th. So make sure that if you're interested, you send in your application before that. You can email me or send me a message on LinkedIn. My email address is mark at servicesignshow.com and if you wanna read all about campfires, head over to servicesignshow.com slash campfire. You'll find the three questions that I just talked about over there. That's it from my end. Even if you're not an in-house service designer, I hope that you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable. Keep making a positive impact and I'll catch you very soon.