 Hi, I'm Megan and I'm Eric and this is The Service Design Show. With The Service Design Show, we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are shaping the service design field. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments and the challenges up ahead. My guests in this episode are Eric Flowers and Megan Miller. They are the co-founders of the website called PracticalServiceDesign.com. They are both in-house service designer, Megan works at Stanford University and Eric at Intuit. So for the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like why is jobs to be done, the hottest thing on the select channel with practical service design. We'll be talking about when will cyber services be ready for service design and of course we'll also talk about the ultimate practicality of service design. So if you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. Welcome to the show, Eric and Megan. Hello. Hi. Great to have you here from, you're in the Bay Area right now. At Stanford actually, right? It's a beautiful sunny day today. Yeah, and it's very nice to have you. Eric and Megan, a question for both of you. Do you remember your very first encounter with service design? Yes, I do. So in 2013, I took adaptive paths UX intensive training and they actually have a whole day as part of that dedicated to service design. And it really felt very new and especially to everyone in the audience. We were in Seattle and they were really just introducing the blueprinting concepts and this kind of end-to-end experience lens. And it really shaped the direction of my last several years and my career. How about you, Eric? I have a similar story. I had been playing around with a new kind of deeper format of persona journey mapping that ended up looking a lot like a service blueprint. I didn't know it at the time and I ended up at the Managing Experience Conference in early 2013 where in the workshop the term service blueprint was brought up and I'd never heard it before. And so I went home and researched and decided, wow, service design. This is what I wanted to do and I've been trying to do, but I didn't know that there was a school of thought and resources and real specific things. And so I actually literally made a decision to say, all right, my old career is over and this is what I do now. I need to figure out how to transition. That was three and a half years ago. And how did that transition work out for you? I'm going to say it was a success. The butterfly has left the cocoon and is flying now. And it was really all due to just one certain person who hired me on kind of a leap of faith. So we don't really know what service design is, but we know we want to bring it to this company. I met her at a service design conference and a month later I moved halfway across the company to take my first job as an official service designer just like that. You created your own job at that moment. Pretty much, yeah, in a place where it was completely unknown and with no definition at all. Awesome. I would almost say congratulations. So Eric and Megan, let's explain the format to the people that haven't seen any of the previous episodes and we're going to co-create the questions that we're going to talk about. And I have a stack of papers with some topics here and you also have a stack of papers but with question starters. Yeah. I'll pick one of these topics that you provided me and you'll pick one of the questions that I provided you and then we'll have to co-create the question. Easy as that. All right. Let me go through the, yeah, let me just start with this one because this is probably very close to your heart and very dear to your heart. It's the topic of ultimate practicality, which question starter goes along with that one and who will answer that? I'll start the question and Megan can answer it. Go ahead. Why? Megan, why is ultimate practicality one of the topics that we want to talk about today? Well, so if you're familiar with the work that Eric and I have been doing collaboratively at PracticalServiceDesign.com, our whole MO is about bringing practicality to the field. For both of us who have, you know, recently in the last three years made transitions from doing UX design to doing service design, making that transition was extremely hard. There isn't a big community out here in the US, particularly here in Silicon Valley. Companies haven't really heard of this yet. When you talk about it with your peers, they get a blank stare. So service design, we wanted to create a bridge from this theoretical high level idea of designing for a service to making it something that's extremely practical that we could apply today, tomorrow in our jobs with people who are unfamiliar with the concepts. So this commitment to practicality is really the deeper motivator for both Eric and I in what we do at work, in what we do with the online Slack community, in what we do with all the materials and the blog posts and content that we create, because we truly believe that in order for service design to reach the next generation and reach this area out here in the tech world, we have to make it more practical, we have to come up with a new way to apply service design. Hold on, Megan, because I'm really confused. There are so many examples of service design or service design related projects from the US, and now you're telling us that it's unknown and people will give you a blank stare? How's that possible? So the key to the adoption of people who have downloaded our ebook, there's been almost 3,000 downloads in the last year and the Slack community's got 1,500 people, and so maybe it's just her and I and the people we attract, but the practicality comes down to every day. Every day we get some sort of email or message or some sort of communication from people who are working from the ground up in companies in places that they don't know what to do and the resources and the projects and the case studies and the conference talks. It's not instructional, it's not practical. It's not, hey, I'm one person, I'm a business analyst, I'm a product manager at a huge cell phone company. This place couldn't be less design oriented, but I've heard about this service design. I don't know what to do. No one's going to give me any money. I'm not going to be able to hire anybody. How does one person bring service design and this thinking and mindset and start up a project and get some quick wins up on the board in a place that has no support for it? And so maybe our audience is more of the lone practitioner or the people who see it from the bottom up and not the top down. But I think to your question, when we're talking with all of these digital focused companies, we have lots of friends and peers that work at Google, at Facebook, at LinkedIn, I mean you name it, all any of these tech companies, these tech companies have not heard of or embraced service design. They might be doing some parts of it, but the farthest people have gotten in our world in this kind of technical services world is that they have really advanced UX programs and they might have people doing this type of mapping or activities, but there's no organizational structure in place in these companies to support service design work and there's nobody who's really embracing it as an official methodology or approach in these companies. They're not hiring service designers. No one can work for me. We wrote about this article on the service design network and what it comes down to is tech companies and tech companies, you know, software is eating the world. I mean all these places out here are ubiquitous across the globe and right now the product and the interface and the visuals and the interaction is what rules the decisions. We still see it as an app on a phone. We still see it as something in your browser. Even these companies that you would think have service design baked into their DNA, I think Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and the ones we talk about at service design conferences, they don't have service designers and they haven't actually acknowledged that that's what they're doing and they haven't officially formalized that role. And they might be designing for services and offering services. If you look at like what is service design, what is it trying to accomplish? They're backing their way into it, not knowing that they're doing it and what you do is you end up with a whole bunch of parts and pieces and kind of ideas and you don't realize that you're creating this Frankenstein's monster of pieces of UX and service design and it becomes incoherent and inconsistent to the point to where they end up coming to our website or getting on the slack saying, hey, we've got this thing. It kind of resembles what you're talking about, but at this point there is no one who knows how to wrangle all this together and say, okay, now we truly know how to design for an end-to-end service from the human perspective and not from where we've got all this cool technology. We've got AI, we've got voice recognition, we've got everything on the app, but you know what, no one took a step back and said, how does this serve the need and the goal of the people who are going to use this across their daily lives? And looking from the work you've accomplished with practical service design in the past two and a half years or when it starts something like that, what is the biggest difference you see between the moment you started and the moment where now? So we launched PracticalServiceDesign.com almost a year ago, so it was last November. And since then we've seen an explosive growth in the Slack community and I would bet that about 90, 95% of the people who are joining are people who are where we were maybe two or three years ago who have just heard about service design and really, really want to get into it but they don't know where to start. And it's that helping the next generation of service designers kind of gain some traction, find a way to practice this in their daily lives. So I think we have seen, you know, since starting this project we've seen an incredible amount of interest and buzz and definitely the conversation is shifting and more and more people at companies that we know are really interested in learning more and adopting some of these practices and calling them by the name Service Design or formalizing it. I mean my job is an example of that. A year and a half ago I started this transition. I was working in the web team here as a web and product designer and I was really pushing to do more service design and it took me a while but now I'm managing the service design team that I'm creating here in the sport. So I think that the tides are turning, you know, it's definitely shifting out here but it's taking, it's going to take a while. One final question about the topic you mentioned, a Slack channel. Is it open for anyone to join? Yeah, it's open for anyone. We have people on every continent but Antarctica so if there's any service designers down there please join. So how can people join? What is the Slack channel name? It's taken to PracticalServiceDesign.com. You'll see the community tab there. There's a lot of resources there and you can request an invite. It's free, it's open. We do screen because we want it to be a safe space so we let everyone in for the most part but we want to make sure you're a real person. When I hand check everyone who types in their info I have to go and look up and make sure that they're real and so I've single-handedly invited 1,500 people over the last 10 months. My hand is killing me. You're building a big network. Awesome, I would invite everyone to join so you'll have 1,500 more people on the Slack channel in the next week probably. Let's move on to topic number two I think it will be, I hope it will be your turn to answer this question Eric. It's the topic of jobs to be done. You have every cryptic topics. What is the question? I'm going to use the dot-dot-dot because there's nothing that really fits. Eric tell us what is jobs to be done and why is this the hot topic that's been going around in Slack for the last month and a half? I'm so glad you asked me that. It's certainly something that is new to me and to a lot of people as a concept. It's not new. It's been talked about in lots of different industry circles and a lot of academic environments and it's never really been connected to service design specifically like I'm looking at it now but jobs to be done, it's just a name for kind of a theoretic construct. It just very simply breaks down to people are trying to accomplish some job in their life. They just are trying to get something done. One super simple example from my real life is into it works with people who are self-employed where they're just a sole proprietor. It's just one person getting it out trying to make things happen. Their job to be done is to save money, be better prepared to do taxes and optimize this really hard life of being self-employed. When they come to us, they're saying I just need help being better at being self-employed. I'm going to hire you and hire this product you have to help me do that. Their job to be done it's not a user story in our product. It has nothing to do with us. They're hiring us to provide a service to get them from, hey, I'm confused. I have to report my mileage to the IRS to deduct it to, hey, I saved this many dollars at the end of the year. Jobs to be done says they're hiring us to perform or provide a service to them. That's what we're being hired to do. There are a lot of ways we can do that. Maybe it's an app, maybe it's phone support, maybe it's a carrier pigeon. It doesn't really matter at first. Once we have a concept of what is the job they're trying to accomplish, then we can go really broad and say, how do we design for that service? There's lots of different ways we can do it. Then as service designers, as companies, as people, we can approach it with customer success in mind because we want to be successful in getting that job done and it really liberates us from just thinking as we provide products and we sell things to we truly perform and provide service to these people. As I connect jobs to be done with service design, it breaks it away from a persona journey or a persona at all or a story and into people have something much, much, much bigger than us, bigger than us people who sell things to them and we truly need to be there to facilitate and assist and that can take a lot of different forms. Do you have anything to add to that, Magan? Yeah, so what I was surprised at was that over the last month and a half, as I mentioned in our Slack community, this topic has been the hottest topic of discussion and I think part of it is that, as we mentioned, especially in this kind of digital services space, very development driven companies, right? Use cases, user stories are kind of the thing, the bread and butter of development focused companies and we really, our community has kind of landed on this like user stories don't cut it anymore but jobs to be done as a different framework, a different lens for looking at whether you're satisfying the customer need is a really useful new way to talk about it and I have to say, as I've been starting to integrate this more into my conversations and my job, framing things this way has just opened up so many people's eyes on what you can do because it's not limited to like, I need to be able to click on this feature. Does this phrase liberate the whole conversation from screens, apps, and it takes it to, makes it channel agnostic? Yes, yes, exactly. And for a digital services space, that's really, it's hard for them to make that leap. So, yeah. And what have people found so far, coming from the practical side? Any practical tips or ideas or insights that have emerged that people can use tomorrow? Yeah, so a lot of folks are using this framework as a way to code their research findings. So what are the, for example, what are the pains, gains, and jobs to be done that you're finding in interviewing users? So it's a frame from which to conduct qualitative research. It's also, if you kind of Google job story, there's a job story format that is out there, it's a simple template, but an alternative to a user story format. And I think that's an incredibly practical way to integrate jobs to be done into a development environment or maybe you use that to define your stories that get in your development backlog. Yeah, go ahead, Eric. Well, one other practical application that has surprised me is that if you can get a way to explain it to other people in your company and to leaders especially, you have your little snippet, you put it in your presentation deck about what you want to do, and I think people who lead companies and organizations or parts of companies, when you explain it when I started to use the phrase jobs and jobs to be done, they instantly understand it because at a high level, that's how they see things, because they might be managing multiple product teams, they're seeing an ecosystem and a large end to end and they kind of feel it. But then kind of the siloed myopic view of people who are focused really narrowly on a part of an app or a part of a screen, they've lost that big picture. So Sue, I've said to people, hey, customers are hiring our company to perform things and we happen to be based in software and financial services, but really, you know, we are just there to serve them reaching a much larger goal. Instantly, everyone's like, yeah, that's what I've been talking about, that's it. Okay, let's focus on that. And then within minutes, people are using the phrase that they're understanding it, and so like we're talking about practical, you're finally bringing people to the level. It opens doors. It opens doors to the service design conversation, and it's hard to do that. I think it's also strongly links to the why of companies, right? Yeah. Why are we here on Earth? Yeah, that's exactly it. Making money is an outcome of how successful you are at making customers successful and what they're trying to do. And they're not trying to buy your product. They're not, they don't even want to have to use it. Man, imagine if they get it done and not have to do anything. That's kind of the ultimate goal, to work yourself out of existence. Yeah, yeah. All right. Interesting. Jobs to be done. Google that. And I think we can, it's interesting to see those crossovers coming from the digital world and things like this moving back into the service design world. I think we can learn still a lot from that. So we have a third topic, and it's called cyber services. All right. I'm going to jump. All right. Wow. Okay. You're just on point with these questions. All right. So Eric, you'll start. When will cyber services or digital services be ready to adopt services like that? Wow. Great question. Geez. So I used the word cyber services. It's just a way to combine two things people are familiar with. And so today, at least in our world, it's all, everything's digital. And the way we're trying to offer service, we don't work for airlines, for hotels. We don't work for places that are real tangible in real life, human to human things. A lot of times it's human to machine. And if you look at the way things are going, Internet of Things, AI, you've got Siri and Cortana or Alexa or whatever that, what it's called. And bots, bots are huge. Everyone's interacting with bots. So we're trying to come up with ways to serve people's needs through technology and sometimes taking the humanness out of one half of the equation. And voice recognition in AI is inhuman. It's awesome. But we're trying to create these big connected digital services that are software driven. Yeah. So how do we use service design and the ethos, which typically relies heavily on front stage and back stage actors when we're turning those actors into... An omnichannel, too. An omnichannel, yeah. Right, where now we have, from a lot of people's perspectives working in these software as a service companies, it's what they're like, what do you mean omnichannel? We're digital, that's all we are. So it's even just educating people on how you can scale the methodology, takes time. Yeah. So back to the question, Eric, when is it going to happen? When is it going to happen? I think right now the differentiators and the way people are going to start getting advantages is those who embrace the idea of a service mindset, of serving a need, of how do you perform service. And maybe it is through AI, maybe it is through bots, maybe it is through voice recognition, home appliances that can turn your lights on and unlock your doors. But we have to accept the fact that those things act in service of a larger need. Nobody actually wants voice recognition if it doesn't perform something that enhances their lives. And we're focused, I mean, everyone's focused on what we can do and not how we apply it humanely yet, which is why the Internet of Things is sometimes called the Internet of Shit, nothing works and nothing is together. Yeah. So I guess that's for me the key of this whole talk, applying the humane part to, let's say, touch points in our service design world where people are not involved and still making those humane, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. We're trying to come up with scalable, very smart technological means and taking the humans out of the equation. And if you want to serve people through an AI voice recognition that talks back to you and simulate a human voice as closely as possible, you really have to think, where is the humanity in this and how do we simulate this as acting as something that's performing a service? What's my larger job to be done as a person when it's all digital? Yeah, and the big change that is happening is that those digital touch points that we are creating used to be very one-way. They wouldn't interact with you, but now with bots and AI you actually start to get some sort of interaction and an interaction that we also have with humans. So I guess the big change isn't there. It's not like a click and then nothing happens, but you sort of have a two-way communication with the technologies you were talking about. And the companies that are creating all of these digital services, they're set up in product silos often. And we don't see designers working across those touch points yet because you're still on the team that makes the app or makes the this or makes that feature. And silos are good and necessary for development, but we need a new role. We need these companies to start adopting service design as a new function in their organization. We've been reading the org design for Design Org's book, which lays it out so plainly and simply. If you haven't read it, check it out. There's a diagram where they talk about how do you scale up a design team and how do you have service design, where does it fit? And it's awesome. It's awesome to see that laid out and published and put out there in the world that these companies are considering. But it really, we're still at the beginning of this change. Adaptive Path is definitely a leader in the space. There's others that are leaders in this space, but many of these big companies aren't there yet. Well, just one little add-on to that is in the world of digital, you've got very deep, focused people who are designing for experiences, but I have yet to find hardly any, maybe senior principle level contributor designers that are working horizontally across all this, working in building bridges. So if you're out there, get in touch with us. That's what's missing in the digital world is that I think people are scared to say, but if you're designing for experiences, how can you not be focused on one thing? How can you focus on everything horizontally? And yet customers, they only experience things horizontally over time, either over months or over minutes. Or years. Who's the person in our company is that shepherding the people along these touch points? Who's designing that? No. Yeah, this has been a really hot topic on the show. Who is responsible for the total customer experience? Is there someone responsible? Should there be someone responsible? Yeah. So we're moving through our time and this is a question that I really want to ask you before we leave. You've had the experience, the honor to enter the service design world not so long ago and have a community of 1,500 people around you. And I'm really curious if they ask you, guys listen, I want to get into service design, what is the ultimate tip? What would you say to them? We get this question every day. I mean, this is a constant question. And I mean, the first answer is join the community because you can put your questions out there and you'll get an answer. You'll get somebody answering you. So having that community access is really important. We've created a service design 101 page on our website with some links. And so there's a couple of books we recommend. The main book is Service Design for Business by the Live Work Guys. That's our number one book recommendation if you are just getting into service design, highly recommend reading at least the first half of that book. And just start doing service design. I think that's the other big tip is you have to find a way to try to practice this. And it might mean getting out of your comfort zone and taking charge of an end-to-end perspective that nobody's in charge of yet and that you thought wasn't part of your role in responsibility. So when I first got into service design, I just decided to make up a project and do it and involve my team. And I wasn't in charge of the whole request and onboarding process for new customers, but I did it anyway. And I think for those out there who are really struggling to find that first place to start, come join the Slack and throw out some ideas and we'll give you feedback because that's what that community is about. And if I were to, a lot of times if I were to just tell people, what do I actually do? What am I going to do tomorrow? What I've seen work at tons of companies, big, big companies that have people that come in and they're drowning in the size of their company. What I'm going to tell people then and what I'm going to tell them now here on the service design show is figure out how to build a blueprint of some experience, get a nice big printer, print it out, do the project, have it ready and go find ways for executives to see it. Because I've seen this in some of the biggest, I mean Fortune 50 companies where some little small-time person will do it and executives walk by and people walk by and it's the first time they've seen these experiences that might be responsible for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and they look at it. And where I first, one of the biggest wins I've ever had was to have kind of this crappy blueprint that I printed out on pieces of paper and then taped it all together because I didn't have a big printer and I brought it into an executive review with someone, an EVP who reports right into its CEO and I showed it to him and I put it in front of him on the conference room table and he looks at it and he's a pretty intimidating guy and he looks at it and he's like, this is what I've been talking about when I say end to end. And that was it. That was the start of everything because it was this simplistic visual that he knew about in his head as the boss of the bosses and there's always people who do work in it every day but they're too low to see the big picture and suddenly you had executives and contributors on the same page with the shared knowledge looking at the literal exact same physical thing and that took us two days worth of getting together mapping it out, coming up with some weird formats like years ago when I first started it into it and just being able to see that it awakened everybody to serve as blueprinting to get evidence. Yeah, just bring it. Put it in your face. That's basically your tip. Make sure they stumble over it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and put your work out there even if it's messy, even if it looks like post-it notes. Because I can promise nobody knows the end to end. Nobody does. I have seen a single company that can sit down and say, this is what happens to our customers from awareness to either they abandon us and we need or they become multi-year. I mean, into it's got customers that have been using us for 25, 30 years. Talk about a journey. Yeah. All right. Final, final question. I'm sure you still have a lot of questions, things that keep you awake. What are the topics that you are thinking about? What are your big questions? Name one. Name one. Or do you want us to focus on the things that keep us awake at night because there might be a difference there? Let's keep them on track what services are related things. Absolutely. So the things that keep me awake at night but are also on my mind all the time right now as I'm building out my team are how do I prove the value of what we're doing? So I'm going from last week it was me and one other person and this week I'm the manager and I have an open rec and I got all this expectation from my company to prove because I've made all these promises that service design is the right thing for us to be doing. So how do I really show the value of service design? I know that's a big topic for a lot of people. It's how do you measure and communicate that value that's going to be on my mind I'm sure forever. But it's the big thing right now. And for you Eric. For me one of the one of the scariest parts of service design what keeps me up at night and if people are thinking like oh yeah I want to move to the Bay Area I'm going to do it out there that sounds awesome. I would say right now that person would be ahead of their time and you're really narrowing places are going to get it and really narrowing down where you're going to be able to work and it's scary when you're doing something that you believe in and you can really see it starting to work but it's almost like look no one's going to hire you to do that because we don't get it and so it's like you have to make your own way. Yeah you're specializing yourself out of a job in something that in 10 years you'll have the keys to the kingdom but right now you really have to find inspired innovative forward thinking places who can see like me personally I'm not worried about how things are today I'm worried about how they were going to be in the future and you're going to have to find special people who also believe in that as much as you believe in it and that's what keeps me up at night is did I over specialize? Did I over specialize? I'm finding that people well you know it's still we've been doing this for the last 10 years and we're still we still need to explain and show the value to people and I guess this won't be over tomorrow and I'm really happy that a lot of people see the value and are interested in that and we need to spread the word that's the only thing we can do right? Yeah I mean that's kind of what we're all about is helping make space for that next generation to take root Awesome Megan Eric thanks for your time Well it was great talking about these topics and these were really interesting topics that haven't been on the show Deadmarch so thank you again Thank you so much, it was fun What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Eric and Megan? How do you make service design practical? Let us know down below in the comments If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers, check out some of the best episodes and subscribe to the channel We bring you a new video every two weeks For now, thanks for watching and see you in the next episode