 In this video, you'll learn how you as a service design professional can help organizations that are highly product-focused go through their analog transformation without losing your mind. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, I'm Chris Wisden, and this is the service design show, episode 138. Hi, I'm Mark Fontaine, and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people and business. Our guest in this episode is the co-author of the book, Orchestrating Experiences. He's currently the design program director for data and AI at IBM. It's Chris Wisden. More and more companies that started out being highly tech-driven are realizing that they need to go beyond screens if they want to provide a great user experience. Of course, Uber needs to think about cars and cab drivers, Airbnb about properties and renters, and even Amazon has their own delivery service, which is as non-digital as it can be. But it's not just these tech giants. Almost every tech company is now looking at experiences beyond the screen. With this realization that there is more than just a digital interface, these organizations are starting to hire service designers. But it's not easy to come in as a service design professional and add value in these environments. Anyone who has tried it knows that the odds are not stacked in your favor most of the time. Well, Chris Wisden has been through this process a few times, and in this episode he shares what are and aren't good ways to build an appetite for service design in organizations which are going through their analog transformation. And I can guarantee you, you'll walk away with some very hands-on things you can implement in your own practice the next day, which are going to help you find more support and appreciation for your work as a service designer. If you enjoyed topics like this, make sure you subscribe to the channel and click that subscribe button if you haven't done so already. We bring a new episode like this every week or so. Now, it's time for you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation with Chris Wisden. Welcome to the show, Chris. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Really, looking forward to our conversation, it's going to be about a topic that has somehow appeared on the show quite often in the last weeks, months. I'm recognizing a pattern, so that will be fun and interesting. Chris, for the people who are listening to the podcast, they don't see the video, but in the video people see a book behind you. Maybe some people know you from the book, but if they don't, could you give a brief introduction? Sure, yeah. So right now I'm the Design Program Director at IBM under their data and AI products. And I co-wrote the book, Orchestrating Experiences, with the esteemed Patrick Quattobon, which I think you've had on the show. Yes, it was also on the show. Yeah, and we sort of go back, as I think a few people also have, working at Adaptive Path, which is a UX consultancy, that we were at around 2010 to 2014, at least Patrick and I. And before we were acquired by Capital One, which was a bank here in the US. And yeah, Patrick was also on the show recently. We had Todd Wilkins, so we're Jamie and Hageman, of course. So the Adaptive Path crew is sort of coming on the show regularly. Yeah. Yeah, that's great to see. Chris, you've seen a few episodes, so you know, we have a 60-second question rapid fire round. And I've introduced a new question. So the first person who recognizes the new question, please leave a comment on this episode. I haven't prepared you for the new question. So let's see how this works out. The goal is to answer these questions as quick as possible. Yeah, I've seen it, but I haven't memorized them. I wish I had. I was like, oh, I should know what I'm what I'm going to say. No, it's better this way. So ready when you are. OK. All right. What's always in your fridge? Hot sauce. Now, I don't know if people think they should be refrigerator or not, but I have usually seven or eight bottles of hot sauce. And we'll stir some controversy. Should hot sauce be in the in the fridge? Which book of books are you reading at this moment, if any? Yeah, I do hop around like I'll read two or three at a time. Go a few chapters on each. I'm reading a book on Artemisia Gentilesi, who's like a 17th century broke painter, just her life and work. And I'm reading a book by or it's a it's a compilation of information and data visualization from W.E.B. Du Bois, who's a who's an African American activist that we had co-founded on the ACP, but kind of like Florence Nightingale was this sort of like someone who invested in creating charts and graphs to show data. And in this case, what was happening around the turn of the century for African Americans in the US. Wow, and sounds interesting. If there are links, we'll definitely add them to the show notes. Sure. Now, the new question, what was your first job, Chris? My first job was at a pizzeria. The pizzeria is in Seattle, Washington is called Pollyachies. And it was like a full pizzeria where we where we threw the dough. I had I really loved that job, actually. So it's kind of funny that you say that because I was I was good enough where I could do like two dough tosses at the same time and kind of make a show of it. I always used to say like, you know, if I could make 50 bucks an hour toss a pizza, I'd probably still have the job. Who knows? That was a great job. Um, awesome to know that. Something related to this, what did you want to become as a kid? Was that a pizza artisan? Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't a pizza artisan. I don't know for for a while. I was only in my early teens. I remember thinking about it. And I and I at the time I wanted to be an illustrator. My father worked in advertising. And I thought that was really cool, mostly because his office was really cool. They used to have like all this, you know, kitschy ad stuff, like neon signs. They had a parrot there. And it's like this seems like and they had drafting tables where they looked like they were doing interesting creative work. So for why I wanted to be an illustrator, like a commercial illustrator. So yeah, and then that sort of went into a creative degree more in graphic design, which is where I started. But that that's sort of the thread to getting to graphic design was at first I wanted to be an illustrator. And the final question is, when did you got in touch with Service Design? Yeah, that would probably be actually kind of a two-parter. I was a UX designer or interaction designer this around 2008. And I was working for I was at an agency working for a bank. And the bank was trying to get increased engagement. But they normally did this through different channels where they had like collateral, like brochures. And then they also had mail stuff. And then they had a kiosk in the bank and all these other things. And they wanted to sort of make sense of how to increase digital engagement. This is 2008. So it wasn't really any mobile and everything. And it was one of the first times I really needed to sort of look at the path of touch points that people went through. It wasn't like very qualitative. It was just like making sense of all the channels that were being accounted for. And so I'm researching some stuff. And I kind of came across Lin Show stacks like service blueprint stuff. And that was where and in the context of thinking about services and service design. But I didn't think much of it. It was just kind of an ends to a mean. Oh, I can kind of visualize how these things are connected. And it wasn't until a couple of years later. I remember this distinctly. It was the interaction design conference in 2010. It was in Savannah, Georgia. And I heard Jamie Hageman speak. Interestingly, this was before either of us were working at Adaptive Path by probably just about months. So that was sort of interesting. Like, I think both of us ended up working for Adaptive Path later that year. But he had a service design talk at the interaction design conference. And and I remember thinking, connecting it to what I had done a couple of years earlier, thinking, oh, this is like a whole thing. This isn't just like a I think in the 2008, I thought of more as like marketing and branding, like doing a journey map or doing a blueprint of something, at least in the context that I had researched it. Briefly, but I was like, this is like a whole thing. This is really interesting. And of course, that came up once I started working at Adaptive Path later that year. And Jayman was there a year later. Patrick Quadabond joined. And so all of a sudden there was like they had already started to be looking at and Todd Wilkins, who sort of was my mentor at Adaptive Path. We both worked at the Austin studio, started looking through things through a service design lens. And and Jayman was probably the biggest practice spark for that. But then all of us sort of were buying into the fact that this was sort of where the consultancy was moving at Adaptive Path, where as far as what clients were asking of us. But anyway, that's where it started, was was seeing Jayman talk at the interaction design conference. I'm curious if he knows. And it's a long time ago. So and Jayman is still active in the scene. So that's that's good to see Chris. So let's let's start exploring the topic of today. In our preparation call, you mentioned some interesting things like you're one of your passions is humanizing technology, which I definitely love. I have a software engineering background long, long time ago. And I moved into the design space because exactly this point, I think technology should be needs to be humanized. And the thing that we're going to dig into and I'm going to pick your brain about is how to bring a service design perspective, service design approach into product driven, product centric organizations and mostly digital organizations. Right. Yeah, exactly. And that's that's kind of a personal interest of mine, mostly because I, you know, over the past decade, you know, started to really look through a service design lens and take a service design toolkit. And I love applying it to sort of typical analog or physical services you might have. But I just just as a person point of interest have always been interested in technology, interested in interaction design. So I've wanted to almost selfishly, I've wanted to find where the opportunity is to bring those two together because I'm because I'm motivated by the technology aspect. But I really believe in sort of the systems and services kind of lens to think about them and less of a product, a kind of a discrete product mindset. Yeah. So and it's maybe we need to first distill like who are these organizations that keep talking about products? Well, they are delivering services. So who are they in your eyes? Yeah, in the last decade, what you've seen and it's gotten it goes beyond a decade now, but what we've seen where 10 years ago, you know, is longer than that, but maybe 15 years ago in the Mid-Ox, if there was an Airbnb, if they might have there was a time when they might have just been like a Craigslist just focused on on subletting rents. And they would literally say all we're doing is giving you the interface, the software for people to connect, just like if you sublet through some sort of classified website where like like the Craigslist. But when you see whether it's the ride sharing or it's very technology driven new medical clinics and organizations or the hospitality like Airbnb and and Verbo and these other ones is there. They're taking accountability for a larger swath of the experience, not just saying we can give you a listing and we can connect you guys, you know, and I think it really showed. I think for me the the the moment was when Airbnb I'm using them as an example as kind of a prototype of prototypical example of what you talk what we're talking about as far as the type of product driven company is when they had a lot of issues with homes and apartments being sort of ransacked or or, you know, damaged and vandalized and they had to start and they so what they did is they started offering insurance. So right away, you're doing something that isn't really about digital software like your Twitter or your Slack or your Spotify. This is a service because you have claims and you have warranties and and all of a sudden, you know, you can point to it a little bit on on larger companies that are doing digital transformation. That would be another aspect of it where they realize they can't bolt on just digital. They have to actually blend the two together. But in a lot of the what I would call like the high growth product organizations, those are going to be like your Airbnb's and your Uber's and lifts. And there's and I used to work for a company as head of design for a company called Get Around, which is a car sharing service. So yes, we have an app that allows you to rent the car, but there's claims and there's customer service and there's fleet management. And also they still have a approach as digital product organizations. And and and it's almost a necessity because they because software and digital product is where a lot of investors want to go because it's perceived as a high margin thing. But really, their services then they're using technology, hopefully humanizing technology to enable these services. But their services. Yeah. And it's it's so fascinating to observe this from the outside that there is a lack of acknowledgement or understanding that they are service driven companies. There is such a focus on providing a digital interface, a digital solution. But so much happens outside of the digital realm. What have you seen? Like, what's the consequence? Because these companies start out probably with an entrepreneur who has an idea to solve a problem in the world and then comes up with a digital solution. And then everybody, all the engineers are rally around creating that solution. Nobody looks at the holistic experience, the end to end experience. What do you see happening after a while within these organizations? Yeah, like you said, I mean, they come from a place where where particularly if you kind of leverage out, even if they're not all centered in Silicon Valley, it's sort of that idea of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and investing, the kind of investing network. So they're product minded people. They think of themselves as having a product mindset. And I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It's just more of like a historical thing when thinking about digital and technology. And the investors are looking for the way technology can, you know, accelerate growth and market share. And also when you start with technology, there's all the implicit, the implicitness of being really high margin, right? Because you make a digital thing and then you just get users and the overhead costs are pretty minimal. And then so what happens, though, is sort of similar to the Airbnb example, but a lot of places, whether it's Uber or Lyft, they experience this. They start to bolt on the things that they need to do to take accountability for that full experience. And they end up kind of like a big legacy company, which is like they're really siloed and they kind of backed into being like just some, you know, 50 year old companies going through digital transformation. They just kind of flipped it. They're kind of going through like analog transformation, you know, like service transformation. And then they start to realize, I mean, a lot of these companies now have service designers, which is amazing. And I do think like there's a lot of service designers that don't live inside of a digital product, but I think the digital solutions that are being applied to a larger swath of services is helped, at least in the US, helped the growth of service design. It's got some consequences, like the fact that service design lives inside the digital part of the organization. And so that's another consequence. But as far as them, they basically back into service transformation or analog transformation, where they have the same problems that they have customer service, they have onboarding, and they have physical touch points that people deal with, and they need to figure out how to solve that. And sometimes they go through something, I mean, it's all different language, right? Customer experience, service design, experience design, but they all start to realize they need some connecting mechanism. I'm not sure if that is a coined term like analog transformation or service transformation. I like it. You should grab the domain as soon as possible. So I'm in the privileged position to talk to a lot of service design practitioners, and a lot of them are in these situations where product companies are opening up, are seeing sort of the gap that they have, the blind spot that they had for many years, and then they hire a service designer. And I see these people struggling because like you said, one of the challenges is that you are embedded in a digital team, and there is still very much a focus on the product. You have tons of experience. You've seen many examples. Maybe before we get into some solutions, like what are some of the other challenges that you see where people try to bring in service design into these environments and so often fail? Yeah, and I've done it multiple times, started to build or support a service design practice. And I'll be very honest, I've had mixed results and I hope I've learned a little bit from that. And some of the challenges, one is within a digital product-led organization, centric organization, the roles are really, the existing roles are really well-defined. You know what a product manager does. You know what your developers do. You know what your user experience or product, digital product designers do. And they want it to be a well-oiled machine. You get your investment and you want to scale your product and you want to test all that stuff. And there's lean product development, there's agile, there's design thinking. So they all have sort of these things that we've learned to live with and navigate. So service design is a whole new role and it operates at this real connector level, right? That's meant to either bridge or cross silos. And there's not a mechanism really for them to recognize that role. Everyone, you know, it's just so new for them to think about somebody who isn't trying to take over their responsibility. That's one of the challenges is people tend to think like, this is my thing. You know, there might be trying to facilitate that your thing works really well once they understand how it connects to their thing over here. So one is the fact that it's just such a new role for what they kind of consider a well-oiled machine relative to, like I said, lean and agile and design thinking and how this is like, they call it the three-legged stool or they call it the trinity. It's like, they're really good at that. You add the service design. It's not even really a new leg. It's kind of because those legs all have to go to something it's kind of more of the seat that connects them all. And again, I'm making that up as I go along. So that metaphor doesn't work. I apologize in advance, but and they don't know what to do with that. They don't know how much like a service designer should be accountable for stuff or as a service designer kind of consulting and stuff. And another thing is I had, I hired a new service designer. First service designer I hired at a high growth startup. And two weeks in, she's like, I don't know where my role in the product manager's role starts and stops. There's a lot of overlap because unlike maybe real sort of digital product design, touch point design, service design starts to take accountability at least for helping people understand the backstage. And that's kind of like orchestrating the operations of how we're supporting the front stage stuff. And a product manager does some of that as well. Might be a little bit more confined to their team and the part of a digital product they do, but they're orchestrating the development which is essentially the backstage and any other things. And so one is this the new role and two it's a role that kind of overlaps not just with your UX designers but it actually overlaps with your product managers. And three is I think service design also is finding out and I think we're trying different things to learn like how we should be there, right? Are we more like these consultants enablers should we be more accountable kind of like product managers but different but taking that sort of not just let me help everybody but let me take accountability for certain parts of the service. So I think those are just a few of the challenges you come into in a digital product organization. And we'll dig a little bit deeper into some of them. While you were sharing this, I was thinking like is service design as an approach even compatible with the goal of a product-centric organization? And let me explain what I mean here. And you mentioned already something about scale and growth. I think they are well-oiled machines like you said that's the thing that they're after. While in a lot of service design scenarios the thing that you're trying to figure out is what's the right thing we need to do? And I think in a lot of companies here they sort of feel they figured out what the right thing is to do they just need to do it really fast really cheap and really big. So I'm curious what your take is on this. Like are these two attitudes compatible? I think they're compatible but it is depends. I mean, I think taking out service design I think design in a lot of digital product orgs and even product management depending on the type have some sort of identity crisis where sometimes they're just very market and metric driven and do what they need to do to keep customers happy. Whereas others genuinely and I'll even point this coming like Airbnb who was co-founded by a designer really know that like learning and getting it right and iterating is gonna be the key to having a viable product or service and then the business metrics the financials will follow because you're successfully delivering value for a price and you're making a profit. So it really kind of depends it probably sounds weird but it depends on the soul of the company, right? Because if you have a company that really isn't driven by constantly wanting to learn and improve the customer and user experience then you're not gonna have a compatibility because service design is so in that and because it's more holistic it's gonna have a bigger challenge than say user experience design which can kind of pocket itself and then fight the battle very tactically, right? Like man, I don't care if this company isn't always driven by it. I've got a team and we care about this feature and so we can. So they're sort of enabled to be very tactical even and they still probably have a lot of challenges but even if the company really isn't driven by that they sometimes can pocket it but service design has to work at a wider swath within the organization which means it's gonna have a bigger problem if the company isn't there but there are a lot of digital product companies that are driven by knowing whether it's genuine or it's sort of mercenary as a means to an end that if they make the experience really good for the customer, they deliver value then the business results will proceed and in that case it is pretty compatible. You take a typical product squad and they're gonna sort of want to have the same approach as a service designer or a service design team. Happy to hear that you've had that experience and it's encouraging and hopeful for the people listening. Now, we outlined some challenges. I'm curious based on your experience what have you seen that actually works? What are some things that you did and looked in hindsight and thought, well, that was actually more successful than I could have thought upfront? Yeah, ways to, it's easy in some service designs to sort of forget that even in service design we're still makers and that we can kind of like instantiate or make something tangible. And so the moment we start to lean on that a little bit I see a little bit of breakthroughs, right? And it's one example, it was at the car sharing service and I had a couple of service designers and they knew like, this is new this is kind of a risk, right? I wanted to see what it's like to create a service design practice at a high growth startup. This was like a hundred people it wasn't as big as like the Ubers and Airbnb's cause I thought like, let's start at the beginning. And I'll say it was mixed results but there were some wins. And one was we realized that everyone feels they move fast and they don't often have and the problem is they often don't have time to feel like they can be strategic. Like if you're talking to your customer service organization with the phone lines or an email or you're talking to the claims stuff but it's like they have a punch list of stuff they need to get done next week. So a couple of things I've seen is to kind of reign in the focus sometimes service design wants to look not just like the whole picture but also further ahead. Let's see like what this looks like in two years and let's do this. And so raining in the focus a little bit like let's see really what we want to get done in the next quarter or half year helps a lot. And then starting out by not trying to boil the ocean and connect all the touch points but to sit there and go, how can I just focus on what the pain point is of customer experience? Yes, I want this customer service like the customer care department, like the phone center. Yes, I want that to start to connect with our digital product but let me start helping them solve their own problems first and then they can see the merit of what I can bring to the table as a service designer before I worry about making sure all the touch points are connected. Are they having process issues? Are they having handoff issues? Are they having policy issues that I might be able to take something from my service design toolkit and help and get kind of a narrow win, a narrow win where we're not looking too far ahead and we're not trying to be too broad to start because then people can say you can get in there kind of more quickly get people up for a session here and a session there to get inputs because they don't feel like they can spend even a week doing like a design sprint or something. Like they're just like, they've got to get stuff out the door. They've got to implement a new software ticketing system or they've got to train up a new staff of call center people somewhere else and all that kind of stuff and create training materials, help them locally, so to speak and then start to expand out. Those are two things that I've seen is narrow in the horizon a little bit and start by narrowing in and localizing like where you're helping before you get too carried away with trying to say these all need to be connected. And that's, I think the nature and the challenge of our profession as a service designer, we see the system. We want to understand the system. We sort of see everything connected and interconnected and it's really hard to make compromises or make decisions and accept that you cannot, like you cannot do everything at once. How did you approach that? How did you make those decisions? Where to invest first? I don't have a silver bullet for that. So I was given the green light fairly early on. I had basically said in my interview process when I was interviewing for the head of design position that I wanted to introduce service design and I made a pitch of why. And I had replaced the head count of a UX researcher with a service designer because I thought service designers are often research based. It's like a core competency, but then they can kind of go downstream and across channels and all that. And so I sort of didn't ask them to add any head count. I just replaced the head count. But I didn't hire one for six to eight months because I felt like there was a lot of table setting to do. Like I needed to make sure people knew, people across the organization knew that this is what I wanted to do. I had a, I called it a service design cheat sheet. I had created a doc that had like a couple videos about service design and a couple case studies about it and really took my time socializing what it was and what the value was. And then highlighting like, I don't know this is, I just want to, I think this can help you. And I was lucky because the people in these other parts of the organization, not just the digital product, but in claims and customer care, they loved the idea of help. Because they wanted, they almost thought like, yeah. I want to interrupt you for a second here because this is a really key topic. Socializing and building relationships. We often talk about that in the conversations here. What did you find in these conversations to be convincing and compelling arguments for these people to buy into the idea of service design? It varied from part of the organization to part of the organization. But one of the things, it's really interesting because service design isn't necessarily process engineering. But I wasn't ashamed to just say, what I didn't realize is a lot of these parts of the organization, customer care, claims, fleet management in this case, but some sort of operations type area, they're defined by processes and protocol. And so I basically reframed what service designer was in the manner they could help them saying, they're like human centered process engineers. And if someone who's like real into process or might kind of like bulk at that, but I wasn't ashamed to use what I thought would resonate with them. You've got these moving parts, you have software you need to use, you have staff you need to train, and you've got these moving parts and things you need to process over time, like a claims and a services. And so it's a bunch of journeys and touch points within the silo that, and I pitched that, these are people that take approaches that are basically helping you process engineer, optimize your processes, and that really resonated. And I didn't mind saying that and leveraging that. And I highlighted their pain point was like, we have no time to pull up for strategy. And that is both a good thing and a bad thing from a service design standpoint. It's a bad thing because they don't feel like they have any time to dedicate to somebody who wants to talk strategy. But it's a good thing if they, because they also are saying like, if somebody can help me with strategy, that's gonna be great. And the hard part is the operational part of like, how they don't just hope a service designer goes and does a bunch of process engineering and comes. Like how, because obviously you're not gonna do this well if you don't involve the stakeholders. And that's actually the hard part because they both don't have time for strategy and they're worried about pulling up, but they would really love someone to help them focus on strategy and focus six months ahead or a quarter ahead. What I'm hearing in the story, sorry, is that you basically took a very human centered approach towards your stakeholders because in order to come up with a story that resonates with them, you need to know their language. You need to understand that they deal with processes. You need to understand their pain points. And then it sort of becomes a lot easier to get buy-in from them. It's right on, right? Like I wanted to understand how they're framing their challenges, right? I wanna hear their challenges. And at first I wanna say like, I see where service design can map to this and help them. But I don't wanna sit there and go, learn this whole new thing. I'm gonna tell it to you. I'm gonna say, well, basically you're talking about like coordinating these processes. These people are basically human centered process engineers. And so I did, I worked. And if I modulated that depending on who I was talking to, when I'm talking about service design, helping the digital product team through product discovery, I didn't, I was able to take more of a design and design thinking type of framing of it. But the process of engineering really resonated with those stakeholders. And I wanted to show how it was gonna help them. Yeah. And one of the things I often say is when you wanna sell service design, don't talk about service design. Talk about the problems of the person who you're trying to help. And that makes things so much easier. I'm curious to your experience with regards to the overlap between product managers and service designers. Can you share some examples around that? How did that work out? It was actually pretty tough. At the time, I didn't want to be too disruptive to the, or I didn't wanna make it seem like I was trying to like change too much. And so it narrowed the scope of service design a little bit when I've done this. But we had a couple of breakthroughs and it was interesting because again, it was saying like, let's start really tactically. And one of the, and this is a thematically an area I tend to like to focus on, which are internal tools from a digital standpoint. So a lot of these places have internal tools they use, whether they're off the shelf or homemade to manage customer tickets, to manage, like Airbnb probably has something that is how people access internally all the bookings and see where renters and owners connect. Uber probably has that and get around the car sharing startup. Has a tool that is like, we can see when the rentals are happening, where the cars are, what the status is of their maintenance and all that stuff, let alone off the shelf tools that are for managing customer service tickets. That's interesting because that's where a lot of other things come together. I've worked with large financial institutions and they have like very complicated call center software that brings together all the digital products, checking and credit card. And so it's this traffic hub, right? It's where a lot of stuff comes through. And that instantly means like, our roadmap is dependent on the other areas roadmap, whether it's the customer facing digital product or it's like what claims needs to get into our digital tools or what customer care needs as tickets to get into our digital tools or what fleet management needs to get into the tools. And so we started without struggling to rejigger that of the service designer collaborating with the product manager for the internal tools to create what I call an integrated roadmap. It's not just their roadmap, it's the roadmap of where, well, our tool needs to be prepared when this part of the organization does this new thing. Because all of a sudden this new thing needs to be an instance in our internal software. We need to account for it or track it or create a process or policy around it. And that just helping them define that roadmap where the service designer help facilitated with other teams what was on their roadmap, synthesize that to create this big roadmap. And she was worried, she was like, we have a roadmap and we actually printed it like really large like six feet by six feet. And the things that were being released were like an instance, but it was all coded. So you knew like this thing had to be released when this team releases this. That's why it's called integrated because it's highlighting like dependent releases on each other across the org. And she was like, is that really having an impact? It's not connected to anything that ships. And then like four days later, we saw the founder CEO at the company talking to somebody else over that large map and it was like writing on it and making notes. And we just thought like, well, that's a success. It's a small success, but this is being used to facilitate conversations is being used to help this internal tools team know really what they need to be released based on dependencies elsewhere. So it didn't feel like it was like, oh, am I connected to something that ship? But it really started to have value internally for facilitating that coordination in those conversations. And let's dig into this topical value because it can sometimes be so challenging to see if you're actually making progress or what success looks like. You have to find success as people are using the things that I created. We're not tied to operation. We're not very tactical. So it's really hard to point to something that has touched customers based on your work. So how do you handle your internal dialogue of, am I actually contributing? Here's something. And how do you have the dialogue with the rest of the organization? Like people were asking, what the heck are you actually doing here? Yeah, it's a challenge. A few things that are kind of more like tactical things that I feel help pay that off is again, thinking small early because it might be small effort and you might feel like small impact, but it could be impact. And when you go sort of larger to start, something that might take six months or three months and the outcomes are a little fuzzier, at least their connection. And this is a similar problem, a challenge that we have with researchers as well because researchers want to be connected to the stuff that are outputs and have outcomes and drive that impact and service design is very similar. So when you can start smaller, you can kind of under promise and over deliver, right? And then you document everything. Even like I said, I document, I literally pull out my phone and took a quick picture of that CEO and that other product manager talking in front of it so that you can kind of create a narrative or a story. So those aren't like, this is the hard and fast way you create measurement, but I have found successful that if we can make stuff and sometimes that's making things that are tools that are used, which I would put that roadmap in or making stuff that ends up getting out in the world but making a prototype of it or something like that. But starting small, so you can kind of over promise and under promise and over deliver and documenting it all so you can create a narrative around it. That's very tactical, like it isn't like a magic, like this is how you measure the impact, but once you have the narratives and you can kind of show that around, people are like, yeah, I would want that. That's usually what I've seen is like, oh, I want one of those. I want a roadmap that's going to make me feel good as a product manager if the CEO is in front of my roadmap having important discussions and stuff like that. So thinking small, documenting and sort of under promising, over delivering are kind of the things I've felt like our good recipe to have good stories around the impact. So I'm happy that you're sharing these tactical things because this is what people want to hear and need to deal with. And in relationship to documenting and sharing these narratives, what is the narrative that you're sharing or that you shared which made an impact? Yeah, that's interesting. The narrative is usually documenting, it's almost always the bringing together, right? All of a sudden, if a service designer is facilitating, another thing they did was facilitate roadmap feature prioritization, but they did it in a more methodical way than a typical product manager would do. They had the developers, the designers and some stakeholders in there. And so, and again, I'm documenting all of this so other people can eventually see like, look how we drove consensus with multiple people in the room, right? And then if there's some sort of output and look how that, there's a through line now I'm called the through line to output. Anything I tend to want to output, whether it's a prototype of something or it's a journey map or blueprint, it's usually coded with like where it came from, right? So if you have a storyboard for, you know, where, what the future, in six months it could be or in two years, what the future experience should look like, that storyboard is going to highlight the experience principles that are driven by the insights that research did. And so there's sort of this through line. Like the reason we think this moment should be like this with these features or this experience is because you can literally draw the line back to the research it was or the facilitation that happened. And so that's that through line is usually what we're trying to get after. And that's super important what you, that I want to highlight is you have to keep documenting. It's not like one moment that you document, the evolution or the process or let's use the journey. So you have to even keep documenting maybe up to the point that you're not even involved directly in the product. So what is the product team doing? Are they actually implementing some of the stuff that was discussed in this product roadmap? You need to keep collecting this data. You need to be a journalist for some part. That's a good analogy, a journalist. Because I think I'm a big fan of stories in general, like creating narratives in general, even if it's specifically for product designers doing digital product, but a little loan for service designers because all those silos have their own stories but you got to start showing, but the importance of the story is to really elevate the magic that happens, so to speak, when you start getting multiple functions in a room. And I'll give you a quick anecdote. There's one of my earliest sort of service design oriented projects I did for Adaptive Path was for Rail Europe and they're a ticketing company in the US to help people travel by rail in Europe. And they actually had a really good product, so to speak, a really good service, but they knew that everything was sort of working independently. They were working pretty well independently and that's kind of an interesting problem spaces when you have companies that have the silos, but the silos are actually working pretty well individually in a way that the pain points in connecting them aren't that huge, but we did an early experience map. It's an experience map that I wrote about and so it got shared a lot, but just seeing the big picture for them and thinking of that journey map, that experience map as a narrative, like really opened their eyes because marketing knew marketing really well and they were really doing good job in marketing and operations knew their operations really well and they were doing a really good job and their customer call center was doing really good, but none of them had really zoomed out. And so that as a narrative tool really helped. Now I always use those as tools so they don't end up creating a deliverable but nonetheless, seeing anything whether it's a storyboard, it's a map, it's a blueprint, they should always be framed when you talk about them as a narrative, as a story and again documenting and taking pictures and doing all that stuff. I think the journalist kind of an analog is actually a really good one. I don't see too many people talking about this and putting it up as a very important part of our practice where did you get the inspiration from to do this documentation and narrative? I know we're sort of chasing down the rabbit hole in this documenting stuff, but I think it's super important. Well, when I was getting into, I sort of got a little platform for a few years on the journey maps. I was teaching workshops and doing that and I think because there's, I tend to kind of still a bit of an interaction designer and I tend to think of a lot of the service design and the strategy things as a means to an end for me to design a better touch point even if that's a digital touch point. For other people, they want to zoom up and think about like, or change. That is one reason why I think Patrick and I make good co-authors because we sort of meet in the middle. You could almost say we like meet in the journey and he's really fascinating helping and enabling organizations to implement these changes. I get really interested in now that we have this understanding how to zoom in and make. But to your question, so when I was doing those experienced map journey map things, I was really interested in, I admittedly was interested in some of the craft of making these and I was thinking about them from a narrative and a visualization standpoint. I was referencing Edward Tufty and I was referencing Florence Nightingale visualizations like the way you can visually tell a story like the narrative of that journey map should sort of be like, what's the thing you can see from across the room? Like, and that's like your peaks and valleys. And then what's the thing you can see in a minute when you kind of find out what's happening? And then what's the thing that takes 10 minutes and it's the layers? Like I was always thinking about the story that the map was telling and that's why I've often haven't wanted generic maps. I always kind of think if our research is telling us that the story here is about where people are happy or sad, then I want to tell that story. But if the story is telling us of how they have to they cannot do this journey and to end without switching channels, then the visualization is really more about like where they switch and who switched, how many of them are switching when and I would modulate those maps to tell a story. I wouldn't just always do the sort of happy sad sine wave. I would think about what did our research tell us was the theme? Oh, the theme is about expectations and missing expectations. So I would modulate to that. And that's just sort of carried on. I was always a fan of documenting it selfishly for my own case studies, but thinking about those narratives that they created and those have a lot of impact not only for telling the story of value but usually doing it in the human centered way you hope. Not just this is what the system does but this is how the system is used by real people. So those are the reasons I kind of got value out of doing it. I even wrote a blog post, you know, like seven, eight years ago on the value of saving everything. It was when a lot of us, to finish a lot of us were saying like we don't want deliverables, which I agreed. But I said like, but don't throw out the things that are on the sketches and the photos of post-it notes. Like these are really important. They're not deliverables but don't, you know, baby in the bathwater thing. Like don't forget that we have these things, these artifacts that tell a really important story. And cycling back to Airbnb. There is a classic example and I don't know to which extent it's true but that in their whole way they had a Pixar illustrator draw up the story of the renter and who's renting out their place, right? Oh, I referenced it in workshops when I'm talking about this stuff, absolutely. And I try to emulate actually something like that where I might be at a smaller level like 14 and it might be at a lower fidelity but I'm a proponent of saying like, what is this gonna look? What is should this just look like? And it doesn't show a lot of like features and screens. It just shows like, this is the quality of talking to customer service. This is the quality of using the digital product that we aspire to have. And so it doesn't have to be prescriptive from a this is what your product or service does. It has to be descriptive of qualitatively how people navigate it and are getting value from it. And that might be if we cycle back to the sort of the start of our conversation that might be a very good role for a service designer within a product-centered organization like getting that story right and helping people to align around that story. I think so. I think getting the story is gonna show that impact. And I think it's a way to go into sort of like, oh, a lot of times service designers in this are thought of kind of very consultative and strategic and research and they are and they should be. But if you can find ways to tell those stories, you're making something and just kind of in a mercenary sense, if you're making something and you output something that other people find value in, in a way like your job is safe, it's kind of like if you can, because it again, it may not be the shipped product output, but similar to the fact that like that integrated roadmap told a story, right? It told a story of how these things need to gather and it was done sort of linearly, not like in a roadmap Gantt chart. It was shown where almost like more like a linear ecosystem of like, these are the things that need to happen. And if you're making things in that, then you're furthering your value downstream as a service designer. If you find whether it's a storyboard or it's the right models that you're thinking about like those journey maps that are telling that you're thinking about just like, here's some boxes and arrows, but you're telling a story with it. I think that increases your value as a contributor. Now, sort of wrapping up, I'm really curious like let's imagine a scenario where you would get hired by the next blockchain wealth on the start of looking to change the world in some way. And you would be like the first service designer there on that team. What would be some of the first things you would do right now knowing what you know about working in these kind of environments? Yeah, so if there's probably think if I was the first, which is kind of weird sometimes it's more like I wanna create a service design practice versus I'm the first hire. I think it is very challenging if you are sort of just the first hire as a service designer and you're the only service designer because I think there's almost like a mini tribe or faction you can create if you are able to hire two or three service designers because when you're kind of floating on your own it can be really hard. What I would say if you're in that situation in a high growth digital product obviously I would set out to be learning about all the ports of the organizations and building those relationships but I wouldn't necessarily seeing like well, I can do this for you tomorrow. I would sit there and go you're always balancing kind of like the impact you can have, but I would actually value what's something you can have bigger impact like if you can have like a good size impact let's say the impact is a four out of five in a five point value scale of impact but it's your new service designer and it will take you three months. Here's something that it would be like a two and a half to a three impact and it would take you six weeks. I would prioritize the six week one. Again, I was prioritized being able to make sure that the point in which you engage with a team, a person or a function in the organization you have line of sight into what you need to do to sort of complete it, get your outputs and get your outcomes that you want with it. And prioritize that even if it's lower impact over something that could be higher impact. So really again, it's that thinking small thing get the small wins early have people have said like I want more of that, right? And then, and so don't boil because I do see it. It's like I want to the whole point is you brought this on so I can connect all these touch points and channels over time and space but don't boil the ocean to start because not everybody's sort of ready to engage but if you can demonstrate it small. And then if I'm kind of in my role where I'm probably gonna hire service designers I already know I can target those ahead of time like that sort of groundwork laying I'll build those relationships. So if you have somebody where they can consider it ahead of time versus someone says because what'll happen is either somebody is like me as a service designer who's over the whole design practice and I can do things ahead for my first or second service design hire but a lot of times it's like they aren't really connected to service time they just realize they need it and so let's get a service designer so then it's on the designer to figure that out but if I'm hiring and I know I can build those relationships and I can target those what I didn't do the first time when I was doing this was know at the scale at which I should be thinking about those smaller projects and quick wins there was one where we just spent like three days prototyping a new, there was a keyboard keys that are in our parking lot for this car sharing service and we have fleet management and we basically prototyped a new keyboard that was diagrammed to the parking lot layout so that you knew where the key was parked very simple, took three days to prototype and create a pegboard for keys that had tape on it and it was organized, they loved it they loved it and it was very low investment for them I don't mean from a time standpoint but something was made and it improved their processes I didn't improve their ability to valet the cars in and out to do their installations and stuff think small and build those relationships Very helpful advice Now, if there's one thing people remember from our conversation, what do you hope it is? It might be that, I think it's a thing small I think it's, but it is hard because the aspiration is to go bigger so it is to be able to be more embedded higher up in the organization and really be connecting the parts of the organization so I think keep that aspiration to do that I'm not saying just decide to stay small but I'm saying start small, start kind of localized and I know it's been referenced before but it's kind of like that power of 10 Eames video it's like start at the hand and then do something there and then zoom up to the body and then zoom up to the park and then zoom up to the city and do it that way step your way up to the big zoom And that's the most challenging part there is you have to have patience You have to accept that you, it will take it can take quite a lot of time before you reach the level where you might want to have influence It's a really good point because there's a presumption is like, well, you have to have patience when you're in the big legacy orgs that are starting to introduce it like healthcare and financial services they move slow don't presume that just because high growth startups try to move fast that when it comes to doing this work that they'll all of a sudden move a lot faster it does take some patience And in the meantime, you can deliver value under the technical skill and you can deliver a lot of value because the human perspective yeah, adds value there as well Um, Chris, thanks for sharing this I hope it inspired somebody it helped somebody who's listening right now in this situation I know a lot of service designers are and more and more service designers are getting into these positions because like you said the product-centered organizations are realizing that they need to figure out what their analog transformation looks like so thank you again for addressing this Hey, I appreciate having you having me on and it's been fun Awesome that you made it all the way till the end of the conversation I really hope you enjoyed it and got something useful out of it If you did, make sure you click that subscribe button so you won't miss any future episodes Thanks a lot for listening to The Service Design Show It was a great pleasure having you and I'll catch you soon in the next video