The full question
“What does Service Design look like in large corporations and what is the role of the Service Designer in them?”
Summary of the video
Service designers in large corporations are part of a team and have no special role
It's important for service designers to stay humble in their interactions with the rest of the team
Resources are available to learn how service designers work in big organizations
These resources include YouTube videos and articles from companies like Spotify, Intuit, Airbnb, Lyft, and GVS
The information shared in these resources should be taken with a grain of salt as they are also promotional material made for recruiting of talents
Video transcript
Video transcript
This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.
what those service design look like in large corporation and what is the role of the service designer in these organizations. So I would say the role of the service designer in a big organization is a role is like the role of anybody else. You're in a big organization, so you're part of a team and you're just one other team member.
It's like a humility reminder, but you're not more important than the developer, the business guy, or the secretary. We're just part of the team, and that's one thing that I very strongly think is we're just part of the team. And we should remind that to ourselves to stay humble in our interactions with the rest of the team.
So that's, there is no special role. You're just part of the team. That's one reminder that I would like to give. But obviously there is more. If you're very interested in how it happens in big organizations, I've collected a few resources about how it's, how Some service designers work at Spotify, at Intuit, Airbnb, Lyft, or GVS.
There is a few YouTube videos that you can check out and one or two articles too. So you can hear from the people who work there how it really is. Obviously, remember everything that is shared like this is also kind of promotional material. Always take it with a bit of a grain of salt as you are already doing with what I shared today.
My two cents
I would say that the role of a Service Designer is the same as any other team member of a big organization. Be valuable. It's a humble answer because I don't believe Service Designers are more magical, smarter than other people.
And when it comes to how Service Design looks in large organizations, I've selected below a few examples that might be interesting for you:
Service Design at Intuit
Service Design at Spotify
In 2019 Katie Koch's wrote an article titled "Using Service Design to Create Better, Faster, Stronger Designers" that shows how Service Design is used at Spotify.
In 2022, three Service Design practitioners from Spotify wrote an article called Backstage Tickets to the World of Service Design at Spotify that tries to answer the following questions:
What do service designers at Spotify?
How do they show up?
Who do they serve, and how do they go about doing it?
Service Design at GDS
Going deeper, follow up questions from Jose S.
Jose, the community member who asked this question first, was kind enough to offer some follow up question to go deeper. Here my answers to his follow up questions:
"Are they all service designers? Does it require that this is done by/ with service designers?"
In my opinion it's best if the team is not made just of Service Designers. A good inspiration of that is the Spotify Model where each team is made of a mix of people with different skills.
Why do I believe there is more value in having a mix of people?
It avoids silo thinking like it can be felt in sentences such as "we the service design", "the others don't understand our language!"
"What do service designers bring to the table that makes them unique, beyond personal traits and experience?"
Service Designers bring special things to the table:
Service Designers can often can facilitate co-creation session. This means they can bring people together who have divergent opinions and make them work on one project in a way that is valuable.
They can co-ordinate. They know they are not the experts and therefore they know when to find an expert and when to do things themselves
Service Designers can get shit done quickly. Fast and quick and dirty prototyping doesn't scare them. So they can quickly get an idea out in the field or to stakeholders to get feedback about it.
Service Designers advocate for all sides of the business. They not only advocate for the end user, but also for the employees and the partners.
Obviously that's my biased view of what a Service Design is based on the mindset I think Service Designers have. For more details about the Service Design mindset check this free course.
"Yes, we all need to be humble, but what is your place?"
I would say it's one of bringing people together (different team members, users, stakeholders and partners). Sometimes in the same room and sometimes bring the knowledge and needs of these people to those who don't know about it. A bit cheesy like my first very humble answer :P
A community question
This question was asked by a community member for the second Service Design webinar. You can rewatch the full webinar for free with all the show notes and slides.
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