 In this episode, you'll learn how Spotify is helping to make service design famous. What else? Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Nief. This is the service design show episode 171. Hi, my name is Mark Votijn and welcome back to the service design show, the show where we explore the hidden secrets, tools and methods that you need to know about as a service design professional to be successful, all with the goal of helping you make a positive impact on your business, your customers and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Nief Parsley. Nief is the senior design manager at the number one global streaming platform you also know as Spotify. Nief has years of experience in different design disciplines like UX and product and currently Nief's role is to leverage the power of service design to help and design a better experience for Spotify listeners like you and me. Unless you have been deprived of an internet connection in the last decade, you of course know what Spotify is. Spotify's impact has skyrocketed over the last years and it captured the hearts of listeners across the world. Today, service design is one of the pieces that is helping to drive its growth even further. As you'll hear, Nief is on a mission, a mission to elevate design maturity within the company and our industry as a whole. This for instance means enabling more co-workers to use service design tools and methods within their day-to-day work because service design has the potential to be the approach that waves the work of UX product and other design disciplines together. Now, if this sounds a bit abstract, don't worry, I can assure you that we get very practical in this episode because if you'll stick around, you'll for instance learn how Nief started a service design guild inside Spotify and what made it catch on. You'll also hear how service design is helping different teams to collaborate better and of course you'll hear what it takes to make service design famous inside a large company. Well, that's about it for the intro. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Nief Parsley. Welcome to the show, Nief. Hi, Mark. Hey, good to have you on. I'm really excited about this chat that we're going to have. You have some interesting insights and learnings about how to build and grow and nurture service design inside. Quite unique and large organization. We'll dive into that in a second, but for people who haven't googled you yet or listened to my introduction of this episode, could you briefly give an introduction of who you are and what you do these days? Yeah, of course. My name is Nief Parsley. I am at Spotify. I've been there for about a year and a half leading designers from service design, product design, content design. I do lots of focus on the customer life cycle and journey and focusing on a robust messaging platform and organization that we have at Spotify. One and a half year. I'm sure you learned already a lot of things. So many things. All right. Before we dive in, we have a lightning round, five questions to get to know you as a person next to the professional a bit better. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. I haven't prepared you so just the first thing. I'm a little nervous about this one. We'll see what comes out of it. Let me start with question number one. That's an easy one to get in. If you could be an animal, which animal would you like to be? For some reason, Squirrel came to mind first. I'm not proud of it, but that's just where my mind went. They're so fast and they can kind of go anywhere, yet a little graceful with the flow of their tails. I have three squirrels in my backyard and I keep staring at them each and every morning. But that's as a side track. If you could recommend one book to anyone listening, which book would you recommend? Just one. That's interesting. It might be Miss Match by Oh, I'm Embarrassed Cat. I'm missing her last name, but about inclusive design. It's a great read. I definitely recommend it. Yes. And the last name is also sort of jumping my mind, but we'll get to it. It starts with an H. It starts with an H. I know that. We'll get to it and we'll make sure to add it in the show notes as always. Nief, what's always in your fridge? Milk. I don't drink milk, but I have young children. So milk is a staple. All right. Speaking about children, what did you want to become when you were a kid? I wanted to be a painter, an artist. Yeah. And so I've actually recently outfitted my office space to be half painting studio, half Spotify design leadership office. Good for you. And last question, which is a tradition here on the show. Do you recall the first moment you got in touch with service design? I do. I was in grad school. I was at Parsons studying design and tech and I did an internship with a small design shop. And that's when I was first introduced to service design. Can we tell which design shop it was? Yes. It was called Acuity Group. It then merged with Fjord, which is now Accenture Song, I believe. Yes. Okay. A lot of evolution there. A lot of mergers and acquisitions, consolidations in the industry. Cool. Thank you for this lightning round. You did really well. No reason to be nervous. Let's dive into the topic of today. And I had a hard time sort of summarizing it, but what if I would say that it's about maturing service design inside a product led organization? Does that make sense? I think that's super close. The only edit I would make is maturing design in a product organization through service design. Interesting. That's an interesting nuance. Okay. Let's unpack that step by step. And the first thing that I think would be really helpful to know is a bit more about your journey. So you mentioned you're at Spotify for the last 18 months, one and a half year. How did you end up there? What is your current role? What are your responsibilities? So maybe we can set the stage a bit. Yeah, absolutely. I think technically I was hired as a product design manager. Personally, I'm not so interested in hands-on product design. I've done it because I think any design leadership position should be fairly well versed across different design functions. But when I dug into the role a little bit more, I understood that service design would be hugely valuable to the org and perhaps it wasn't identified explicitly as a need. But the messaging organization at Spotify, as I mentioned, it's this robust, fairly mature at this stage platform for we call them bandmates, our internal spotifiers to send communications out to listeners all over the world. And so we focus on these internal systems, processes and tools, as well as that and listener-facing experience. And so the opportunity to deeply connect those two layers was really enticing to me. So that's what I set out to do and have been doing for the past year and a half. I've also led teams for new value creation in an interim basis. And we serve as a tight-knit leadership team across design in what's now the Framium organization. Okay, cool. That sounds like you've seen already a lot of parts of the org. When I was preparing for our chat, I was curious to hear what makes you interested in this topic? What gets you going? Why did you decide to share this with the audience? Yeah, it's a really good question. It's messy and I think a lot of product organizations struggle with design maturity. It's something that we've heard across the design industry broadly for years and years. And I think it was Envision who coined the design maturity model and framework. And it's been a super hot topic of like, how do we get design a seat at the table? And I think there is such an opportunity for service design to really drive that because service design practitioners or folks who are well-versed in service design are also well-versed in business and technology and design and can really be that connective thread. Yeah, there should be at least first in technology and business. And still the question remains, what makes you passionate about this? What opportunity do you see? Yeah, that's an even better question that I still have an answer to. Well, I think that no one's solved it yet. That's why I'm interested in it. It doesn't feel like anyone's doing it perfectly. And I think there's just a lot of opportunity for more forward progress. And I think that again, like service design practitioners and leaders are super well suited to make forward progress and help others do the same as well. Now, a term like design maturity and elevating design maturity can mean a lot of things. I'd like to understand a little bit, what does it mean to you? Like, what does the elevating design maturity mean for you? Yeah, I think I'm going to go back to the cliche of having a seat at the table. I think if I were to boil the ocean and reduce it down to a single phrase or two, I think it would be that that design thinkers and leaders are involved in important organizational product and service decision making. One thing I didn't mention at the start, in which might also be helpful for some context is the way we got in touch is that I read an article by, I think people from your team about how service design is organized at Spotify. And I was really amazed, positively amazed by the article. For me, it felt like almost a manifesto that any internal service design team should have. And I thought, well, I need to know what's going on here. So that's how we got in touch about this article and sort of the ideas and the visions that live within Spotify. I'm curious, why did this article come to be? Because this is not the only one. There are, I think, at least three or four. Why are you publishing this? Yeah, so that article first was written by Grace, Rebecca and Marco, who are all incredible design practitioners across different business units in Spotify. So that's one thing that I want to highlight that's really special about the service design community at Spotify that we are really deeply collaborating across the entire organization. And this article came to be because we had started the service design guild, which I'm sure we can dig into a little more as well. And thinking about the guild started with two design leaders just connecting over Afika, so a casual coffee chat. And we decided to create this community because we started identifying service design happening across the organization, but no one was really talking to each other. And once the community came together, we understood that a lot of people outside of Spotify likely don't know that service design is happening in Spotify. And so we wanted to get the word out there because you might see a role posted that we're hiring for like a senior product designer or something. And it might turn away folks who are traditionally trained service designers when really like we're looking for you. We need service designers, we need folks who think and use those service design methodologies. And so it was important for us to come forward with an accurate representation of like this is what part of our design org is focused on and doing. Yeah. And it's super cool that you're sort of stating that publicly planting a flag. And I can imagine that it also it almost also read like a manual or how to use us as service designers internally. You could potentially keep this internal. But you're doing our community a great service by actually sharing this in a broader spectrum. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, like it's been extremely beneficial internally as well. We recently relaunched our career framework for entire design org and have incorporated the service design function as a part of that too. So it's all a part of making service design famous both within Spotify and outside. So many things you mentioned the guilt, you mentioned the career framework, all the things that I want to touch upon. So let's maybe stick a bit longer with a sort of the way service design is currently organized as Spotify. You mentioned something about two service design leaders connecting with each other over Fika. Could you could you take us on a journey how service design maybe has evolved in the recent months, years at Spotify? And where is it today? Yeah, absolutely. Like many things at Spotify, it's been fairly organic. So myself and Jason Gang, who is also in our org design leader here, are both traditionally trained as service designers, but leading mostly product designers in our respective orgs. And we set up time to just connect as humans and service design thinkers. And so to date, service design has been organized similar to how we might staff product design, which is embedded in orgs and teams. So whether that's what we call a tribe or a product area or a squad. And long term, that's likely not necessarily the right approach. I think it's definitely right for the level of maturity that the function of service design is at Spotify. So we have embedded service designers. So Grace, who was one of the co-authors of that articles in business affairs, Marko's and content design and safety, Rebecca's and messaging. So we are fairly embedded in that way. You mentioned that it might not be that way in the future, but right now that fits the current tribe or the current organization, organizational model best. Is that the reason why it's currently organized in that way? Yeah, I would say it is. I think there's a lot of opportunity for service design to have a lot of impact organized in this way, like very focused within. So I'll focus on messaging as the example. There are many systems we use to message our listeners. There are many tools we use. There are many touch points and channels that those communications appear for our listeners. There's so much opportunity just in that bubble of messaging. And of course, our service design practitioners need to extend beyond that to do their jobs well, but being able to create that focus and again, tie it back to making service design famous, showcasing impact in those focused areas. So I see a really interesting transition here because we could almost say that service designers are currently based in a mini company, like they have their own bubble or department or area of focus. And what I've been seeing, especially around in-house service designers is we want to connect sort of on a higher level and talk to other service designers regardless whether they're working in insurance, healthcare or banking or Spotify. Is that also one of the reasons why something like the Guild emerged? Yeah, I think there's this bi-directional dialogue that the service design community at Spotify is really hungry for. So we want to get our voice out there as we've started to do with things like that backstage tickets article that you referenced, but we also want to learn from the community as well. And so this is one of our focuses for this year in 2023 is to also just connect more with other practitioners and share learnings. And connecting with other practitioners, maybe even outside of Spotify, but I'm also curious, what is the shape and form of this internal Guild? Yeah, so right now there are, I believe, 50 members as a part of our Slack channel. Some of them are our quiet lurkers on the activity. Some of them are actually managers of service designers who are not actually trained in service design themselves, so for them to stay in touch. And then we have a smaller crew smaller than 50 who are actively engaged working on things like external comms, like the article you mentioned, and internal opportunity sourcing and things like that. And sort of this grew from two to 50 in a period of less than two years basically, right? And I think you also mentioned that it contains people who don't per se have the title service design, but affiliate or associate themselves with the practice. How do these people find the community the Guild? I think there's been a lot of word of mouth. My partner Jason and I did a presentation at an internal design conference that we held this past year in Barcelona, and we talked about service design. And within the hour we had like our numbers in our Slack channel started going up, and they started going up from people who weren't in attendance, which meant that people who were in attendance were slacking their friends who maybe were back at their home office who were user researchers or data scientists or manager, whoever it might have been. And so I think it's just been a lot of word of mouth, honestly. Cool. Yeah. And what makes, if you could make some assumptions, what is the thing that you feel is attracting your colleagues to this community? So this is going to be full of assumptions. I think one thing is service design to a lot of people internally at Spotify is new. We both know obviously that service design itself is not new. But the terminology, the methodologies, a lot of it is new to folks. And so I think that's enticing to think there are things out there that methodologies out there of solving problems that I have that I don't know about. Like I want to work with these people. I want to learn more about it. I think one challenge that we're facing is that we are still like very early in that education phase of helping people understand how to best work with service design practitioners and what value service design practitioners can really add. And I'm assuming that articles like the backstage, the backstage of service design, what was the exact title? Very cool. It was backstage tickets to the world of service design at Spotify. Exactly. Yes. So I'm assuming articles like that help. Where do you see the need for most education? So maybe what are some of the biggest misconceptions or where do you see that there is opportunity for your colleagues to make better use of the service design capabilities? I'm trying to think of just one. I think about a lot of the challenges that product designers face. And one of them is a lot of product designers, I know at some point in their career have been asked to design a deck for someone, whether it's a product manager, an engineer, whoever. And some product designers love designing decks and there's nothing wrong with designing decks. But oftentimes it feels like a reduction of skill set of like, oh, I can only design decks. That's all I'm being sought out for as opposed to thought partnership. And for service design, I equate it to the request for like workshop facilitation or asking for a blueprint, for example. And so these are some of the challenges that we're facing today and that illustrate that kind of early stage education. Yeah. So a limited scope of how service design can add value and where in the process it can add value. And I'm, it's not surprising that people first tack on to the very tangible things like, I don't know, blueprints or workshops. And it's hard to sort of see the added value, the strategic added value at the start of a project defining a brief stuff like that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I feel fortunate that Spotify is full of people who are open to being told that of saying like, oh, hey, you asked for a workshop for me to facilitate a workshop, but I actually questioned the need for this workshop. Can we talk about that? And they're like, oh, yeah, let's talk about it. And so that like willingness to learn, I've, I've definitely observed across the organization, which again, like is, is very exciting because that means things can and will change. It just takes time. Yeah. Hearing other stories from other in-house service design professionals, they would love to trade places with you hearing this example. So let's just transition into a different topic. It's maybe a bit of, I don't know, we're heading into all the, all different directions today, but that's okay. And it's mostly me to blame and my interest and curiosity. You mentioned a career framework. So can you share a bit more about that? What's that? How did it come to be? Yeah, absolutely. So the career framework at Spotify for design was redesigned, relaunched almost a year ago now. I can't remember exactly what. And within the past 12 months, and we went from something that was, I'll say, a bit minimal. So not a ton of detail or specificity. And we had identified some improvements there. And we shifted to this new one, which is very robust. As I mentioned, we added the service design function on this career framework that didn't exist before. And I think something that was really exciting that is working toward this vision of service design helping to mature design in organizations, but also to communicate the value of service design is across all functions, we have a core set of competencies. And then for any function, like product design or content design or service design, we have just like swap out to, right? So for example, vision and strategy, storytelling, human centered approach, insights, these are things that all functions should have competency in. And then for service design, specifically, we add in systemic design and information science where for product design, we have more like prototyping and things of that nature. And so I think being able to communicate, we are all like thought leaders and design partners with all of our cross functional partners. And we have these like specialized skill sets within each of our functions. So it's really helpful and valuable. When you say it is a robust framework, what makes it robust from your perspective? Yeah, I think being able to, so I gave, I don't know, five ish examples of competencies. And though there are far more than five. So that's what I mean by robust. And I think the risk of a very detailed or robust, I might use those terms interchangeably, career framework is that people might use it as a checklist. And so we've trained managers, people managers across the design organization to, you know, guide and coach their direct reports and in terms of not doing that, because it isn't a checklist, you don't need to be perfect across the board for all of the things in order to get promoted. But, but yeah, I guess just having a very specific framework. I can imagine that this also helps people to see a path forward in their careers because especially in service design, it's really hard to imagine you start out as a junior, you started with as being a service design professional with less experience and then you move on to becoming a service design professional with more experience. But it's really hard to imagine. Okay, so what's next? What's what does progression look like, except becoming a team lead? Like that's almost looks like the only path forward. Does your framework also include some things like that? Absolutely. We distinguish between a people manager track and an IC track. We actually recently hired our first staff level service designer, which is very exciting. So that's a very more senior than senior, I would say. But I think it's also important to think about you. You mentioned team lead. And I like to really distinguish between like a title and a role. And so you can be a team lead without necessarily being on the people manager track. It's rare, transparently, but it's possible. And being able to be a very senior practitioner and leading a practice is definitely possible and supported at Spotify for service design. And in that kind of role, you're becoming more or less a principal kind of that. That's that's the role I can imagine. Yeah, it's charting toward principal. That's right. How has this framework been received? It's been received very well from I'll speak first from the design community and then service design community. So far, it's been received very well. Folks are very appreciative of the specificity. So they know, like, what is actually expected of them in their roles and being very transparent about has been very helpful. So people can actually assess themselves, honestly, and from service designers in particular, I've been told they haven't seen anything like it for service design in their careers. So that's really exciting that folks are feeling exactly as you had mentioned that like, here is a path like it's not just this black box that I can try and break through. It's like, oh, it's actually very clearly laid out what's what would be expected of me throughout the progression of this career. Might be worth an article in the future. If you decide to share anything more. Yeah, so this sounds like really helpful and valuable and interesting to hear that you're developing this one question that I had remaining about this is what was the most challenging part coming up with this framework? The most challenging part was being distinct enough across functions. So I was a part of, I think there are five or six of us who developed this framework last year. And we, I can't tell you how many hours we spent developing it. And just the scrutiny of, okay, well, we're saying we expect this of a senior service designer, but how is that different from what we expect of a senior product designer and getting very specific across all of these many competencies? I think that was the most challenging part of just really dissecting what is the distinct value of anyone across any function in any role? Well, to which extent, I don't know if you have a design ops team or like was HR involved because this doesn't sound like a service design type of challenge per se. Yes, that's right. We had HR involvement. We had the global head of design ops involved. We had design directors across every business unit. There was, yeah, we had a good mix of folks in the room who were putting this together. We also had our diversity and inclusion rep who we were consulting with along the way to ensure that none of it could be subjective in when going through and assessing someone against the framework. So it was a long journey to get it there. So if that's such a long journey, which I can totally imagine and applaud you for pulling off, at the start, somebody apparently agreed that this is worth the time and investment. What was the reasons somebody signed off on you going on this journey and creating this framework? Yeah, that's actually a great question for our head of design ops because I believe this sign off happened before I joined the company. So I joined the company knowing that this was something that they wanted to tackle and I joined the effort and yeah. Wow. Yeah, so that just shows how much effort it takes and especially if you're starting, I don't know if you're probably not starting from scratch, but if you want to do it right and if you don't want to do it thoroughly and coming back sort of to the central theme of our conversation like elevating design maturity, having a career framework in place sounds to me like definitely a prerequisite if you want to elevate design maturity within your org. Yeah, absolutely. And I think something that I didn't mention also, which was key to this and key to elevating design maturity, whether it's through service design or not, is I know our global head of design ops also worked very closely with other functions, so insights and engineering and product to work with them against their career frameworks as well, so that they're all in dialogue with each other. It's not this silo of, okay, this is just design thinking and what we're expecting. It's all in conversation together, which is really important. And you need a role like design ops to maintain this, a beady champion for something like this. This doesn't happen spontaneously. Absolutely. Yeah. We need to get somebody from more people from the design ops community on the show. I've said that a few times. Well, I'll ping Camden Moore. She's our global head of design ops and she's excellent. I'd be happy to. So surprisingly, we talked quite a lot about the career framework, which is super interesting. But I want to switch back again to how service design is organized and maybe about let's dive into the limitations that you currently see of the current model. So service designers are embedded within product teams or tribes. What's the limitation? I think right now, the limitation is service design thinking is not always being leveraged in high level decision making. Right now, we are often leveraging it in, okay, we've decided this thing is important. Now we have service designers to think about this thing, but we don't, for the most part, we don't have a lot of service design thinking in the, hey, this is the thing that's important that X, Y and Z teams should start thinking about. And so sorry to be so abstract about that. But I think that's where I would love to get us to. And that's part of that is ensuring that service designers have that path in the, that clear path through something like the career framework that we just spoke about, so that they can elevate themselves as individuals to those positions. But I think there's also a lot of opportunity to focus on folks who already hold those positions and ensuring that everyone is well equipped with this skill set or education, not that everyone needs to be a service design practitioner or expert, but to be well versed in it and to be thinking in those ways. That's, that's again, super interesting to hear your experience. And the great thing is that you have hands on and practical experience, which again, yeah, reference. Now, one of the things that I'm also interested in is what does this mean for hiring and staffing? Like if somebody is already part of a team and they have a roadmap for the next 12 months, I don't know how far ahead these teams plan. I don't know. How does that work with staffing, hiring? Yeah. Right now, again, like the, I'll call it sharing of resources, very inhuman way of saying it, to kind of collaborate across the organization is very organic. There's no, for service design, there's no like framework in place, there's no set rules or guidance of how to do it, which I think is right for us right now. And so right now, the way we've been hiring is okay in this tribe. So if we're thinking about the messaging organization, we have X, Y or Z needs within messaging, I'll hire a service designer to help us think through that. Knowing that I'll be connected as that individual's line manager, I'll be connecting that individual across organizations to ensure that they have the right context and things of that nature. But even yesterday, there was a request for service design help in a different part of the organization who presumably doesn't have service design support. And they're reaching out in the organization and say, is anyone interested in this kind of work? Like how can we start to like we have serve it clear services I need? And how can we address those? So super organic today. And in the future, I imagine that'll change. One other question related to this is, if you look back at your last 80 months there, what would you describe as the maybe the biggest progression that has been made from your perspective? Again, we have to put an asterisk next to everything you say, probably like, this is, this is your opinion. And this is your experience. So what do you feel has been the biggest progression in the last months? I think the biggest progression is people are asking for service design. That's huge. I almost can't believe that it's happening as much as it is, honestly. And I think like, as cheesy as it sounds, the whole like making service design famous has paid off. People might not know exactly what they need from us, but they know to ask us. And that's an amazing first step, because that immediately brings visibility to service design practitioners across the company to things that they might not have had visibility to previously. So what's the and this is like the million dollar question like, what made service design famous? Did you have a number one hit? Like, what was, was there a star project? Did the CEO pitch you somewhere? Like, what created the demand that now people are knocking on your door instead of you having to sort of go around and trying to sell what you do? Yeah, it's a few things. I think honestly, getting service design called out in the career framework was huge. Like for the design community that all immediately all however many 300 plus designers were like, oh, service design is a recognized thing here. And so that that was huge, calling that out explicitly because everyone kind of knew we had a bunch of product designers or people were titled as product designers who did service designy stuff. But calling it out explicitly was was maybe step one. I think again, that that presentation I mentioned that our our annual design all hands was also huge. It broke service design down very simply for for anyone, however much exposure they've had to it in the past, and identified where we're having impact across the organization utilizing these methodologies and thinking. And then another part of it is also just schmoozing. So at work events, talking up the work of service designers and doing so cross functionally specifically so connecting with the VP of engineering and saying, hey, did you know Rebecca created this systems architecture map that like engineering managers are saying are better than the ones that they can make. And they're identifying all these opportunities that we need to be investing in. Like that peaks interest immediately. And those conversations when they happen casually and naturally can be really impactful. I love that. And you need a role as somebody smoozing service design. But yeah, totally. If that happens often enough. And if you just keep drop name dropping service design and the impact and the outcomes and the how it's been received and sharing the results. Yeah, you're almost like PR manager or something something like that. I know. And it does sound sleazy of like making it famous. But I think that I think acknowledging that you can make it famous without fully educating someone first was really important because that unblocked a lot of progress where it's like make it famous. People are now asking you about it. Then you can step into now this phase that we're now which is focusing on that education piece both within our community of how can we educate each other about different like share methodologies and tool sets. But also our cross functional partners. Yeah, so again, a big compliment here that you use your marketed and positioned service design in a way that it becomes attractive for people to to get them curious to learn more. And I think that's the best position you can be in. Because if there is a demand, it's much easier to educate people rather than having to shove it down their throat. And now there is demand, people are sort of curious, tell me more about it. So yeah, doing good marketing, doing good positioning, maybe maybe maybe hire somebody from the marketing team to help you out with that stuff because it works, right? If you if you do it right, it works. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the next thing on your wish list? What's what's the next step in design maturity? Yeah, I think I'm and I'm not going to call it a wish list because we're just doing it. I think like bucket list. Let's call it the bucket list. Yes, bucket list. I love it. I love it. Love the reframing. Yeah, I think we're doubling down on this education piece. Again, both within our service design community to ensure that we are knowledge sharing both around how we approach problems. So as I mentioned, methodologies, tools, sets, kits, whatever. And also just giving visibility of the type of work happening and doing critique with each other and really helping build each other, each other skill set. And then also cross functionally, right? So how can we now educate our cross functional partners on the value that we bring who haven't worked with us directly yet and what types of things to pull us into and what to ask us for? Instead of saying like, hey, can you facilitate this workshop? Say, hey, I have an idea for a workshop. Will you work with me to see if that's the right thing we need to do? Like simple reframings will be will be big for us. I think something you and I touched on maybe earlier in this chat too is engaging in more of a dialogue with the broader external to Spotify service design community. That's something that the team is really excited about. I think we are hungry to learn and we're hungry to share our successes and failures as well in service of others growth. And so I think that's our immediate focus for now. And I'll be thinking a lot this year about that staffing and resourcing question that we talked about and how we're organized and how and when it might make sense to evolve our current structure. Sounds exciting. You mentioned that you couldn't hope or expect that there would be such a demand for service design right now if you think back, I don't know, two years ago. If we fast forward to the next 18 months or two years and you sort of wildest dreams, what is the thing you can't imagine happening right now which might happen eventually in two years? Does my question make sense? Yeah, no, it's a wonderful question. And two things come immediately to mind. One of them is the highest order leadership, like not understanding why someone in service design or design is not involved in certain decision making if it's not happening. I mean, wildest dreams, it's happening and there's no issue, obviously. But I think that that buy-in and acknowledgement of if it's not happening, why the hell not. And I think another piece to that is who, you know, we talked again about the cliche at the beginning of this around design having a seat at the table. But what if anyone who's at the table has design thinking, is activating their service design thinking chops while they're sitting at the table, whatever their function or title is, I think that would be kind of a dream for me. That basically means giving everybody across the entire organization a certain level of design vocabulary, that they know how to speak the language of design without having to become a trained design practitioner. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. And I think that's a very, very good idea. Really curious where you'll be in two years and how far. Me too. I'm expecting that now that you've stated this publicly that you'll probably be even further than you sort of hope for. It usually goes with that like that. That was the whole reason I came on the show. Just keeping myself accountable. That's good. Just kidding. Well, yeah, no, who knows. So what I was curious is you already have tons of experience. If you would meet your best self or your future self, your best self makes more sense and you go back five years and time and you could give yourself one piece of advice, which piece of advice would you give yourself? I think the piece of advice I would give myself is however insurmountable a challenge may seem, baby steps can make a lot of impact. And so just start doing little things and you'll be surprised by what can happen from it. Is that like eating the elephant with one spoon at a time? Sort of thing? I think that's the saying, right? Or am I completely butchering to say, I don't know. I'll Google it later. No, no. I'm the worst person with these metaphors. I always botch them. But yeah, I think like not waiting for something to be perfect or for you to have this perfect grandiose plan, just like have a vision, take a step, see what happens. You might fall on your face and that's fine. But it was such a small step. Couldn't have been that big of a fall. Cool. So if we try to summarize the last 45 minutes, 15 minutes, what would your summary be from our chat? The summary would be that to elevate design maturity and product organizations, I think it would be very impactful to use service design thinking in doing that and not necessarily elevating service design individuals to these positions of power, which would be great. But it doesn't have to just be that but elevating the craft through people, whatever function they have. Thank you. And I sort of feel that we touched upon many things and maybe I'll need to re-listen to the entire organization, to the entire conversation myself to sort of see and knit everything together. And I think that's the interesting part. This isn't a one silver bullet solution. There are just many moving pieces that all need to, it's a big puzzle and you need to work on multiple areas at the time. Yeah, I think with many things that service designers deal with, it's messy. It is. It's super messy and so was this conversation. No, I really enjoyed it and I appreciate you coming on and sort of continuing your ethos of sharing publicly just like you did with the articles. I hope you'll continue doing that and keep sharing that. Like you said, your successes, but maybe also your failures in the future and sharing that with a broader community. We need this. We need examples. Thank you. So once again, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is fun. Isn't it awesome that we got a brief look at how service design works at Spotify? I'm really curious to learn what your biggest takeaway is from this conversation. Make sure to leave a short comment down below. I've been sharing conversations with industry experts like Neve every two weeks on this channel for over six years now and I don't plan to stop anytime soon. So if you don't want to miss any of the new conversations, make sure you subscribe. My name is Mark van Tijn and I want to thank you for spending a part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.