 In this episode, we'll be talking about the current state of service design in Latin America. We'll talk about how do you accurately measure the effect of service design big topic and we'll talk about what it takes to build, lead and scale successful service design team. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Helene Castilla and this is a service design show. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to do the work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is Salina Castillas. Salina has a really interesting perspective on a big topic in the service design community and that is how to measure the effect and the impact of what we do. We'll talk about a smarter and probably better way to measure that impact of service design. So if that's the topic you're interested in, make sure to watch this episode till the very end. And if you liked this episode and you would like to see more, don't forget that we bring new videos every week here on this channel. So if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe and click the bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos come out. And I've also got a free training on how to explain service design in plain English. If you're interested in that, check the show notes down below for the link to the training. So that's it for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Salina. Welcome to the show, Salina. Hola Marc, how are you? I'm doing great. Nice to have you on the show. Really excited because you were highly recommended by one of the previous guests. So that's what I always like. Salina, for the people who don't know who you are, could you give a really brief introduction? Who are you? Well, I'm Salina Castilla, I'm a Mexican, I live in Mexico City. I have a Bachelor's degree in Arts, but I took another turn for me and then I started working with design back in the day when the dot com era. And it come now that I'm the design director for Scotiabank and I'm in charge of providing support to four countries here, which are Colombia, Peru, Chile and Mexico. Alright, interesting. A bank, design, regional design director at a bank. Really curious which topics you picked. We'll be there in a minute. Salina, this is called the service design show and I always ask my guests, do you remember the very first time that you heard about the term service design? I'm not sure. To be pretty honest, I'm not sure when I first heard it. I mean, I come from 10 years of working in design thinking and at some point I started hearing a lot more of service design. I think that the first time I realized that the term was going, it was with the book, this is service design. Which book? Oh yeah, the classic, the black one. Yeah, the black one. So that's when I realized that there was something more other than design thinking, a more holistic view and a more practical approach. And I guess that was the first time. I don't know if that was like eight years ago, maybe, seven? I'm not sure. I mean, I just saw right here in Mexico City. So I remember that I thought it was going to be like, okay, this is something different. Cool. Nice. Salina, we're going to do interview jazz. I'm going to register that domain really quickly. Do you, are you ready to start? Yes. Me too. I have your three topics here. Yeah, let's start with this one. The first topic is service design in Latin America. Do you have a question starter? I think so. I have this one. Okay. It's why. And I would ask, why is service design important in Latin America? And I mean, I can say a lot of things, but the first thing I can say is that the design practice needs to be elevated. Here in Latin America and other countries, we still think of design as something straight, strictly correlated to the aesthetics of something, right? Not into something that can solve problems or even provide solutions by taking opportunities of growing for people, right? So why design service in Latin America? Because this is the time. I guess that we are ready. We are prepared. We are willing to listen to these new terms and these new methodologies. We are willing to use them and we are willing to provide people with change. What is the thing that you think is needed to really take service design to the next level in Latin America? Well, number one is people understanding what it is and scaling their capabilities and skills from a tactical and operational design level into a more strategic one. Even if there are people that they are just like operating design, I think that there's a lot of opportunity and intelligence in designers to start taking one step more and taking a more holistic view on what it is. So that's one thing I would say. The other thing I'd say that it's a buy-in from companies and big institutions because there's a lot of small companies doing this, but the service design can only work when you have someone that is willing to push it to the top, right? You need big clients, yeah. I mean, more than big clients, big advocates, right? Because you can have a big client, they buy you in, but they don't understand what you're doing or something. But when they really understand what you're doing and why you're doing it, it's not just buying into the results. It's buying into the whole methodology, right? And do you feel that service design is in any way different in Latin America compared to what's happening in the States, what's happening in Europe? Well, here it's still pretty new, right? And it's still part of our ecosystem of buzzwords such as design thinking, user-centered design, strategic design, even UX or even UI design, right? So I don't think that we necessarily have the proper way to differentiate between one another. So that's the main challenge for us who have been here for a long while, right? To start providing people with distinctions between one thing and another and the value that each one provides into the services or into the things that you are designing, the solutions that you are designing. So who do you think will be the leaders or the big, who will be these big advocates? Where are they hidden right now? My guess is that they are hidden in the top of the companies but also in the bottom. For me, new methodologies depend on two things. When you're talking about very hierarchical constructions of companies, you have people who operate and you have people who make the huge decisions and you have a lot of people in the middle who are kind of tactical and most of the times people in the middle, they don't want things to be changed, right? Because they are... But when you are talking about operations and mainly operational design and technology, for instance, also people is really junk and very prone to prove new stuff. So when you can connect this kind of drive with the drive of change that people at the top need but they don't understand how to make, that's when the change might happen. And I think that you can just start talking with people and figuring out who really understands what you're talking about or are willing to give it a try with very simple stuff like, okay, let's build a customer journey map, right? These are very simple tools but once you put one in place, people start realizing that something, they are missing something, right? They don't understand the whole view of design, service or whatever or service design, sorry. But they can understand that something's missing and then you can help them fix it. But do you feel, will this come from the public sector? Will this come from the commercial sector? I think that it's easier for it to come from the commercial sector because the governments here, at least in Mexico City, they are kind of very difficult organizations to navigate. So it's difficult to enter them. There's also some independent initiatives that are working with service design too. And I think that they are doing a great job in advocacy because they are the ones that are going to pull the other people from the companies. I think that it will come from people who are willing to pay for it, more than the government. I don't think the government is going to do it. Maybe I'm saying something terrible here, but I don't see the government paying for this anytime soon. So service design in Latin America, how would you... So if we have to summarize this, how would you describe the current state of service design? I would use one word, junk and driven. That's the second one, yeah, junk. But as everyone who is young is pretty driven and motivated. Young and driven, okay. I'm ready to move on to topic number two. Okay. Yeah? Because this is going to be a topic where we can spend the next 30 minutes on. It's called measuring service design. And again, the question, do we have a question starter? Yeah, okay. So I just rolled the PDF, so I have this one. Interesting. How far? Yeah, how far shall we go in measuring service design? Maybe that's a good question. That's a really good question. And more than how to do it is how far shall we go? And maybe I would say that we should measure it to the point where it makes sense for somebody else, right? Other than over measuring whatever we're doing in every step of the process, maybe we should figure out what can make us turn the wheel with the outcome and measure just the more precise things that are changing the service or making the service very important for people. And now give us some examples. What do you mean? Maybe I'm going to start talking about the bank, right? Because those are my most fresh samples. Go ahead, yeah. We're designing this service in which we can provide people with a new car insurance, right? And a part of it is the digital platform, of course, because that's my day-to-day job. But that's not the only thing that you need to understand because their journey doesn't start there. And people, they have their concerns and their needs. And the journey starts much more before that and ends. I mean, it should never end, right? Yeah. But which are the parts that we really want to measure about that? Are we willing to measure if they really evaluated all the options? If they are willing to, how do you say it, re-contract automatically or not? And I would say that maybe that's important and that's important for the business and that's okay. I mean, we have to have a set of metrics. But also what I would like to really measure and understand is how do they fill with the service once they have it and once they use it? And sometimes we kind of not take a look at that, right? How do they fill with the small letters that come in between all the contracts that they have to find? So maybe there are some other things that if we measure them correctly, we are not just going to change the business or sell more insurance, but we can really make a different service for those people. And I think that that's our job, right? We give a set of metrics for the business and that's okay. You can measure whatever your KPI is, but we also have to measure whatever is important for the people, for the users. And, you know, just saying what gets measured gets done is one that I like a lot. And measuring within service design is really a big topic because everybody is saying that we need to measure, but it's hard to measure. It's easy to measure how many new contracts you've signed, but how do you measure the, like you said, how people feel about your service? How do you approach that? I mean, we definitely need to create a new set of metrics. And that's expensive, right? To understand which metrics that we want to create and to follow up with them. It takes time. That's why I think that it's important to just pick just the priority or a couple of priorities and maintain your eyes on them. I would say that one thing is obviously keeping contact with people, right? But also, I mean, we need to start looking, what's the better way to measure that? Because we need to start poking into the users constantly. So give us an insight into your head. What do you think we should be measuring? What are the things that really matter? Well, I mean, of course, it depends on the service, right? And it depends. You can start with very basic stuff like security, certainty, which are the very basic of the pyramids, right? Yeah. That way. So if you're like providing a service that it's very basic, I think that you should provide and measure the very basic stuff as you start going up and up into the pyramid. If we think that's a good way to understand human behavior, you need to start understanding where does the mind goes. For instance, if I am consuming a luxury watch, right? I don't care about the price. I don't mind about the features or functionalities. What is really important for me about a luxury watch, right? Or is it measuring time? Is it really making it stand out every time I use it? Do I only like to have it, but I don't use it? So every time you go into a new service or solution, you need to understand where does the value from that solution come from because that's what you should be looking at, right? If someone that un-stabilizes that, it's going to break up the solution. And now I'm trying to approach this from a different angle because the things we try to measure are really hard to quantify and are really therefore hard to sort of put a business value price tag on that. Like if you're in your example with car insurance if people sort of feel safe and secure with their contract. Have you found ways or methods to bring that back into a language that business people understand? Well, my first approach to that is show them people saying stuff. That always makes people like, oh my God, so this is for real. Because when you have a business and you've been there for quite a while, you think that your business is the best thing in the world, that everyone is like willing to queue outside of your store or something to buy whatever you're selling or consume whatever you're trying to provide them. But that's not the reality. And the best thing to start the conversation for me when I talk about this is show them some proof that what the users say is different of what they think. If it's really different, which usually is, because there are small nuances that even though they perceive that customers are not happy with the service, they cannot put the finger on the very sweet spot. It's really interesting that you say that showing sort of what people are saying is the measurement. This is exactly what I just said this week in our project where our client asked, okay, we just did like 10 interviews with people. How are we going to sort of prove that this has value? And I just said, just show them the quotes. Just show them the photos. It's not the quantitative value that proves the impact on a measurement. It's a qualitative value. And just one quote can have the same impact as a thousand numbers, right? Yes. That's like a muse bush, right? Once you show people that, they are willing to listen to everything else that you have to say. Yeah. In regards to measuring service design, you said how far should we go? What is too far in your opinion? Have we taken it too far? Are we trying to take it too far? Is that a problem? Well, I wouldn't say that here in Latin. But since this is something that we are constantly worrying about, my take is more like, don't worry about taking it too far. Just focus on some few things that you really need to understand and you really need to follow up. Because for me measuring service design, it has to do a lot more with timing and being constant, right? If you measure something month by month or quarter by quarter, that's more important than trying to measure like 12 things when you cannot follow up with any of those. That's a great insight. I really like that one. And figuring out what the thing is that you need to measure, I guess that's the hard part, right? Yes. Yes, but I mean, if you do it right, you can have like a lot of things to understand in the long run, other than being trying to measure everything that's on your table and trying to provide that to the business because that's work and provide anything that's useful. And I guess that's why also things like the Net Promoter Score were so successful because they just focused on one question, measuring one question and do it like regularly and then that gives you sort of progress. It's like finding your Net Promoter Score question. What is that? Yes, exactly. Because the Net Promoter Score, well, that's another story. Yeah, that's another story, but the power of that was really that they had just one focus. It's just one question, just measuring one thing. Cool. We're blazing through this, but the last one, the third topic is also super interesting. I think you can share a lot about this from your role as a design director. So there we go. So topic number three is building and leading, building, leading and scaling. Okay, let me figure out. Okay, design, jazz, drum roll. What is it going to be, Selena? Oh, well, this is a pretty good one. How can we, right? How can we build, lead and scale design practices, right? Big topic, again, yeah. But this is a good one, right? Because the first thing that maybe you have to understand, or at least it took me a while to understand, it's like not necessarily to build, but to lead and to scale, you have to at some point start operating, right? So operating, I mean, like really managing the project by the project of a team or people, one person at a time, you need to start like looking at a more holistic view of everything. You're building a, you need to build a design factory. Well, more or less yes. Question mark, yeah. I would say that some part of it can be a factory because you need to start producing according to a methodology. And I mean, if you have the right people, they can like start producing that like as if they were tacos, right? Yeah. But I think that there's another layer, which is not necessarily the taco layer, like the factory layer, which is you have to start putting dots together, right? Because you can have a lot of information produced, a lot of ideas produced, but not necessarily connected to the needs that you need to solve, right? In a way that is strategic. And that's what you need different, a different set of mindsets, right? And how can I connect the dots? And if you're also talking about the biggest scale, you need people who can connect dots from, let's say, one city to another or one country to another or one continent to another, which that's when it gets complicated, right? Because we're talking about service design and services for people and people is different everywhere. So what have you found in, what have been the biggest difficulties for you to lead and scale the design practice? Well, one, that it's pretty common here in Latin America and it's finding talent, because every country has a different state of maturity. So in one place you can find like a lot of new service designers. Here in Mexico, the oldest service designers are like, we're all eight years old or they come from another background or whatever, but there's a lot of people who has like, let's say five, three years doing stuff. So they are pretty new and obviously they didn't, most of them they didn't learn that at a school. There's a few people that, I mean, they were lucky to study somewhere else abroad, but most of them they are just like making some courses here and there or practices in some studios, no? So finding talent is one, mostly finding senior talent or more experienced talent, it's complicated. The other one, it's really understanding that you cannot follow a formula to build a design team, right? Why not? Why can't you follow a formula? Because it has a lot to do in the context where the team is going to live, right? So you can have some sort of template or idea and let's say, okay, so I need people who can, two service designers, maybe three people who do research, maybe do two or three people who do database or content or UX or whatever else you want to name it. But then when you try to place a team in a context, the needs of the context some of the time are a little bit different than what you expected. So you have to figure things out. I mean, for instance, here in Mexico in the team that we built for the bank, we started this research group and in this research group, now there's only one researcher, there's one service designer, but there's one girl that is just a specialist in providing or creating learning experiences, right? Not necessarily in learning in the formal term that we knew like 20 years ago, learning materials because that's what was needed to connect with everything we are doing to all of the areas of the business and also with the people to make the service available, right? Really available. Not just to throw it out there, just to make it really available and consumable. So that happens every time you go to another place and you figure out, okay, so you have this org chart that HR provided you and they found it from somewhere in Google or whatever a friend of a friend gave it to them. But in reality, you need to find the right people, right? The skills and the people. For me, that's about building it. Okay, skills and people and how do you... What kind of processes and structures have you put into place or are you trying to put in place to make this scalable so that it's easier to... I think I talked with Bernardo about this topic that what we're trying to scale is scale output, right? Scale impact. It's not so much about scaling the same team but it's about scaling impact. What are your thoughts about processes, structures? I mean, to scale something, the first thing is not having a lot of people, it's connecting people. At least that's how it has been for me these last few months that I'm just taking this charge and it's what are your superpowers, right? Let's figure out if we can join those superpowers in building common platforms, learning or knowledge platforms. Because also, I mean, we have a lot of book by the book processes, right? Building some stuff, making interviews, drawing some reports or providing data or finding solutions even. But we need to find the common ground of what works for us, right? Not what's on a book, but what works for us as a community and also start building some frameworks that belong only to us and to that context. For me, that's been amazing because let's say that we are talking about people who are, let's say, service designers. Here in the teams of design, there are just one or two per country and one or two per country, they are fine, but they feel alone, right? They cannot have very deep conversations with people who are doing UI or interviews with users or whatever. So when you can connect all of those people, they are willing to talk about it and to build your stuff and also to start from the point of another one and take it far and away. So that for me, it's amazing to see when you provide someone with something and they take it and then they grow it and then the next one, they grow it even more. I really like that, that it's about scaling design is about building a community and making design, finding your own version of design or finding your own, right? Yes, providing your own perspective into design. Yeah, exactly. And I think what I've seen and I've been advocating that on the show also is that that's what you said about the textbook designers. I think we're sort of... service designers are quite humble. Usually we sort of try to be the facilitator and I think it would be really good if more service designers stepped forward and brought their own perspective into design to make it their own flavor. But I think it's good that we're humble, but sometimes we need to be more leaders. Yes, and I mean, as I was saying, here in Latin America, we're young and driven. Young and driven. So we're young, we're learning, but we're also driven. I mean, if we feel like we have the freedom to change or to tune it, we'll do it. Cool. Selena, you haven't prepared this question, so we're going to see how it goes, but I'm really curious. You have a lot of things on your mind and I'm sure there are things that keep you awake at night related to service design. Is there a question or a topic, well, a question that you would like to ask us, the people who are watching the show or listening to the podcast? Well, I mean, how can we be more connected? For me, that's the main question, because we can find a lot of people everywhere, but how can we be more really, really connected if I need something? How can I just reach someone who is in another country and have an answer, not necessarily quick, but soon? Okay, interesting. How can we be more connected as a global service design community? Yes. Yes, I would like that. I would like that too, and I'm really interested. Just one question about it. Do you feel that the current platforms, which are primarily online, what are they lacking for you to fill that gap? Immediately, I guess. I mean, for instance, here in Latin America, we are very prone to use this application that is called WhatsApp. I don't know if you know it. We have it here too. If we can do something like WhatsApp, like so easy to reach or slack or something, something that is not like in this envelope of formality, something that is really much more casual. Let's say maybe we can do it. We can bring a live slack group with people and just start throwing people there and making channels for something. Let's say there's a slack channel for Latin America Service Design or the slack group of service designers with more than 20 years of experience or something like that. Interesting. I'm really interested in what people have to say about this. I have my own thoughts, so I'll add a comment to the video as well. Celino, we are sort of reaching the end of this episode already. Time flies by. It was just 30 minutes, so it flies by. I really want to thank you for sharing your thoughts and what's on your mind and your perspective on service design in Latin America. It's really good to hear that on the show because, like I said in our chat before, I think service design is much more globally than we sometimes see, so I'm really happy that you shared your perspective. I'm really glad that you invited me. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marc. So what's your tip to be more connected with a global service design community? Share your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments and let's continue their conversation there. I'll try to reply to every comment that is posted. If you enjoyed this episode with Celina, don't forget to click that like button and share this episode with someone who I enjoy our talk to. If you're interested in learning how to explain service design, don't forget that you can sign up for my free training and the link is down below in the show notes and over here. Thanks again for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.