Want to grow as a service designer?

Here are 3 skills you can practice

When I realized I wanted to be a service designer, there were a million articles and books on creating a service blueprint that I could choose from, and conference talks gave me a sense of how service designers contributed to teams.

However, as I progressed in my service design career, I found fewer resources for growing into a more senior-level designer and ultimately having more impact across an organization. What I expected was uncovering more concrete methods and tools, but what I realized is that a lot of the things that helped me level up are intangible and hard to find in a methods book. In fact, creating service blueprints is the least valuable part of what I do now. It is also the part I spend the least amount of time on.

I’m going to walk through three skills that I’ve developed as I have progressed in my service design career and share some resources for further learning.

Facilitation toward alignment

Icon by Max Hancock from Noun Project

Facilitation can take many different forms: facilitating meetings and workshops, facilitating process improvements with multiple stakeholders, or facilitating the creation of different artifacts based on user research, like journey maps or archetypes. At the heart of all of these is a need to create shared understanding and alignment among stakeholders.

How to be effective at this skill

• Being explicit: The more explicit we can be about what the goal is, the decisions that need to be made, and who is in agreement, the more likely we are to remove assumptions.
• Active listening: One way I practice active listening is to replay what I’ve heard back to the people in the room. Not only does this help others feel heard, but it also prevents myself from misunderstanding or making assumptions.
• Making sense of different perspectives: If you are helping a group of stakeholders reach alignment, you are likely dealing with a variety of business needs, user needs, and motivations. An effective facilitator can synthesize these perspectives, consider tradeoffs, and figure out the best path forward for reaching your goals, especially in real-time.

What is challenging about this skill

As service designers, we often interact with multiple stakeholders responsible for different parts of the service journey, so there may be a lot of different motivations at play. This balancing act can be draining.

Aligning on clear roles and responsibilities with involved stakeholders can help. For example, your job as a service designer may be to synthesize and present these different perspectives, but you shouldn’t have to be the decision-maker. You should also create space for yourself to process information or decompress in ways that work for you (especially if you are an introvert like I am).

Practicing this skill

• Start with low stakes: Practice facilitating in low-stakes, “safe” spaces, like within your internal service design team. It might take a while to feel comfortable as a facilitator, but don’t let your inner critic get in the way of practice.
• Remember the goal: Speaking of which, keep the goal in mind as you approach a facilitation opportunity, and make sure everyone involved shares that goal. This is where being explicit can come in handy — I like to communicate that goal everywhere! In your calendar invite, at the top of a meeting, on an artifact. Ask if everyone agrees with that goal, or if they envision it differently.
• Visualize: Use visuals to support facilitation. Slides, an activity on a virtual whiteboard, or a blueprint can help anchor the conversation and give stakeholders something tangible to react and respond to.
• Stretch yourself into different facilitation formats: It can make sense to start with facilitating a workshop because they often have a lot of structure baked in. As I’ve become more comfortable with facilitation, I’ve been able to lead more unstructured facilitation opportunities, like decision-making meetings that go in less predictable directions, because I can navigate ambiguity.

Resources for further learning

• Laura Hogan’s management resources: You don’t have to be a manager for these resources to resonate! She has a lot of topics on communication, influence, and running productive meetings, which all play into effective facilitation.

Being strategic

Icon created by Nuricon from Noun Project

What is this skill

I love what Faster Than 20 founder Eugene Kim says about being strategic: “The goal of a strategy isn’t to have a strategy; it’s to act strategically.”

As service designers, we work cross-functionally and connect the dots across multiple service layers and moving parts. In order to be effective, we can help teams navigate ambiguity and move toward a shared understanding.

How to be effective at this skill

• Tie service design work to organizational values and goals: As you approach your work, make connections between the different layers of context in which your team is operating: the team’s goals and values, the service’s goals and values, and any organization-wide priorities.
• Look two steps ahead and two steps back: Consider what has worked recently and what has gotten in the way of meeting your project’s goals. Use that information to inform next steps.
• Weigh trade-offs based on how they could impact your goals: Inherent in every decision is a series of trade-offs that you are willing to make. Let’s say you are deciding on a certain user research method — how will the different options impact your ability to accomplish your goal, especially when you are facing certain constraints like timeline and budget?

What is challenging about this skill

Being strategic boils down to having a strong point of view, communicating that point of view, and, as Eugene Kim notes in the video I linked above, “constantly revisiting, refining, and making meaning”. But developing a point of view requires a lot of courage, confidence, and practice!

Practicing this skill

• Have a shared understanding of success: How does the scope of work frame project success? Does everyone agree on this definition of project success, and continue to agree on it throughout the project?
• Look 1–2 sprints ahead on the timeline: Where do we need to be by then, and what do we need to do or change in order to get there? Which teams or stakeholders need to be involved?
• Consider the variables at play: What variables have changed in the last sprint (e.g. staffing, budget, research learnings) that could impact our direction?
• Build in moments of reflection: How can you carve out time in your calendar at a regular cadence to ensure you continue to reflect on these questions over time? How can we do that as a team?

Resources for further learning

• “Acting Strategically”, a video by Eugene Kim of Faster Than 20
• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt
• Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary by Dan Hill

Building effective organizational partnerships

Icon by Gerald Wildmoser from Noun Project

What is this skill

Because our work functions across a service journey, service designers are often not executing the design work themselves. Instead, we create recommendations to improve a service based on user research, get buy-in to implement them, and hand off those recommendations to frontline or UX teams to implement them. Even better, we are involving frontline and UX teams in the co-creation of recommendations.

How to be effective at this skill

• Get familiar with the organization: The organization is the context in which this service operates. To successfully partner within the organization, it is important to understand how it is structured, how decisions are made, and how work is delivered and measured.
• Get skilled at handoffs: Consider transitional moments when information flows from one team, person, or channel to another. Within these moments, the service is more likely to break down because teams or processes often exist in siloes. We can leverage our ability to identify and streamline these handoffs, ideally in close collaboration with the teams in question by shifting from work done in isolation and thrown over the fence, toward more partnership opportunities.
• Align on and document processes: The most effective service design teams I’ve been on have had detailed documentation on both the service journey at a high level, who was responsible for what at each step of the way, and mechanisms for keeping this documentation updated over time. Everyone involved in service delivery knew what was expected of them and how they were working toward a certain outcome.
• Prioritize research-based service improvements: Service designers can work upstream in the product development process by partnering with product managers to incorporate research recommendations when scoping new work. This can look like involving product managers in user research share-outs, pairing with them to make the case for certain improvements, and shaping new work.

What is challenging about this skill

An organization has a lot of moving parts. Depending on the organization’s familiarity with service design, it can also take time for people to figure out how to collaborate with service designers. So much of this skill is not just showing up, but making the case for our value add, weaving our capabilities into the process, and showing how we can help teams make a difference in service delivery.

Practicing this skill

• Study the org chart: Org charts can reveal a lot about influence and communication flow.
• Shadow different teams involved in your service: Observing meetings and processes can help you understand how these teams operate. They might also be excited to have someone who cares about their day-to-day work! I’ve found that frontline team members to be incredibly valuable partners because they know process and policies inside and out, and are especially attuned to user needs. Over time, you can form trusted relationships and create a foundation for collaboration.
• Identify areas in a service blueprint where handoffs occur: Visualizing these handoffs through an icon can be a helpful start. From there, you can conduct user research with the teams involved to dive deeper into how these handoffs are currently working, and if there are any areas for improvement.

Resources for further learning

• Beyond the blueprint: methods for service design implementation: I wrote this post a few years ago to document some methods for effective collaboration and service delivery.

Are you ready to try out these skills?

In the spirit of “constantly revisiting, refining, and making meaning”, like I mentioned above, I would love to learn what you glean from this post, how you apply these skills in your own work, and if there are any skills or ways of practicing these skills that you’d like to add. Let me know!