▶️ What's the interplay between business and Service Design?

My two cents

It depends on:

  1. the project

  2. the company service design maturity

  3. your own maturity within the company.

1. Your personal maturity within the company gives you more access

In my experience when you start in a company, the trust level is quite low. Sure. Which means they first throw at you tiny problems to see can this person manage that?

 It's like a Mario game, where you first have to make the first level.

And then when once you've done the first level, oh, okay, this person can handle this kind of problem. Well, let's give her a bit more complex levels. Therefore if you're starting in Service Design in a big organization, it's not per se that you will start this very businessy things where you're gonna be interacting directly with the CEO and this kind of stuff, because obviously

You need to pass the levels to show that you have a good understanding of the company and also that you build the trust.

In my experience, it takes one to two years to get to the level where you have built your track record.

 So if you're pretty new in the company, usually you won't really start with that kind of stuff.

2. The company Service Design Maturity

The other thing is the level of maturity that the company has of understanding that Service Design can also help the CEO, the business team.

There are different understandings of that:

  • Focused on customer experience: There are people who say: "Hey, the Service Design stuff really working well for improving customer experiences." And that's great and we just use it for that.

  • Focused on processes: Other companies say "Service Design is really cool to improve our internal processes". And it's already great that it's used for that.

  • Company wide Service Design: And others say, oh we can really think about our whole company with these tools from Service Design and mixing it with more of them.

At the Service Design Network Global Conference in Canada there was a talk about the maturity of Service Design where the speaker shared an interesting model.

Going further

Watch the full talk about the Service Design Maturity to go further.

More Service Design questions and answers like this one

Check out all the questions about Service Design as a career or the differences and complements between Service Design and other fields.