My two cents
The four common audiences
In my experience, I'd separate the levels of communication when it comes to share what I do as a service designer in these four ways:
Communicate with colleagues
Communicate with direct decision makers (a project leader, my boss, someone who is aware of the project and takes decisions)
Communicate with executives (or a person who makes a ton of decisions and isn't aware of the project)
Communicate with people affected by your work (those who don't take the decisions, but have to live with it)
What each group might need from you
I feel each of these groups has different needs and goals:
To communicate with colleagues share a lot of behind the behind-the-scenes of your work so that they can give precise feedback and be inspired
To communicate with direct decision-makers, give them information so that they can proudly defend the work with their hierarchy
To communicate with executives and share the smallest amount of information necessary and don't share much about the process or methodology.
To communicate with people affected by your work, share as much as possible while you do the work and no decision has been taken yet and involve them in that process as much as possible. Then, when decisions are taken, make sure to be clear if things are decided or not. If things are decided, don't "fake feedback requests" that could make people feel they still have a say when they don't.
Ask how to communicate best
Obviously, each individual has different expectations, needs and goals, even if they are part of a specific group, so it still makes sense to double-check with them what they truly want (see How to learn what a particular audience wants).
What experts say
The three levels of product work
In the podcast episode 175 of the Knowledge Project podcast, Shreyas Doshi shares what are the three levels of product work:
execution level,
impact level
and optics level
What he shows is that:
executives are more concerned about the impact level and the optics level.
product managers and engineers focus more on the executive execution level
What it could mean for service design work
If we bring back that to the service design work, it could mean that:
Service designers often are interested in how their work will be done and the details about it and speak a lot about that.
Executives are mostly interested in what will be the impact and how society customers and other key stakeholders will perceive this.
Therefore, service designers who want to communicate well with executives need to be able to speak more about the impact level and the optics level, as these are the main area of interest for executives