▶️ What are skills you recommend for a service designer

▶️ What are skills you recommend for a service designer

In summary

  1. Project management

  2. Internal politics, lobbying and negotation

  3. Visual communication

  4. Writing

  5. Bonus: understanding technology

In details

The first skill that I had to learn the hard way but that I think is valuable to any service designer is project management. Once you have this skillset, you can not only be someone who produces but also someone who organises bigger projects.

The second skillset I'd recommend to learn about includes: internal politics, lobbying and negotiation. These are the skills that you'll need in a big organization to convince, get buy-in and make projects happen.
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I've also noticed that there were skills I had before coming to Service Design that proved to be extremely useful:

  1. Visual communication: being able to quickly make a good-looking presentation or prototype made me so much faster than other colleagues.

  2. Writing: a good chunk of the service design work I do is summarising either research elements, decisions made in a workshop or an idea. Not being afraid of writing helps a lot.


Finally, a bonus skill if you already have all of this is to understand how technology works. You don't have to be a coder per se, but at least understand what's possible and what isn't. Having built something with no code tools like bubble or Glide, for example, is a good way to get into that mode.

My answer in video

Parts of this answer come from a video I shot for Horváth Zsóka a Service Designer practitioner from Hungary.

Going further

This video sparked an interesting conversation when I shared it on Linkedin.

Q&A Learning Service Design

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How you can learn Service Design

  • ▶️ What are the different stages of learning Service Design?
  • ▶️ Should I go to school or learn Service Design on the job?
  • ▶️ Should I know the business terminology as a service designer?
  • ▶️ What are skills you recommend for a service designer
  • ▶️ Should I follow a course about Service Design?

Where can you learn Service Design?

  • What are free resources to learn Service Design?
  • Where can I learn service design online?
  • What are the best schools to learn Service Design?
  • ▶️ Where can I find a Service Design mentor or coach?
  • What are podcasts focused on Service Design?
  • What are interesting conferences focused on Service Design?
  • What are interesting conferences focused on Service Design?
  • Can I get a Service Design university degree remotely?
  • What are bachelor programs that teach Service Design?
  • ▶️ Why do I like remote Service Design conferences?

Surviving a master in Service Design

  • How do I find a good topic for my Service Design thesis or school project?
  • ▶️ How can I focus my student Service Design project?
  • ▶️ What's a good context for a student project using Service Design?
  • How can I explore more in more depth a Master Service Design topic?
  • Are there good and bad topics for a master Service Design project?
  • ▶️ How to find renewed motivation for your design or research project?
  • How Can You Use AI for Academic Writing?
  • Why is a narrow scope for Master project better for mental health?
  • How can you avoid stupid critics from the people who will grade your work?

PHD in Service Design

  • Where can I find PHD's in Service Design?

Coaching and mentoring for Service Design

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