Beyond the Umbrella: My Service Design Journey in a Series B SaaS Company

In the vibrant and ever-evolving tech startup ecosystem, the distinction between products, services, and experiences often becomes a fine line, blurring the edges of what we traditionally understand these to be. My journey, deeply rooted in the philosophy of empowering startups with user-centric journey management and transformative service design, has been an odyssey of discovery, learning, and, above all, a relentless pursuit of uniting teams for peak performance.

The Genesis of My Quest

My role was to bootstrap a service design function within a Series B SaaS company. From the onset, my mission was clear: to instill a service-oriented mindset amidst a culture predominantly focused on product. This wasn’t just about introducing a new function; it was about nurturing a paradigm shift that would redefine how we approached our offerings and engaged with our customers.

The Umbrella Epiphany: A Personal Revelation

One of the most illuminating moments in my journey came from a simple, everyday dilemma — whether to carry an umbrella to navigate the unpredictable London weather. This personal conundrum led to an epiphany that would later become the cornerstone of my narrative within the company: the difference between a product and a service, encapsulated in the ‘umbrella’ analogy.

The umbrella, while a tangible product, only reveals its true value as a solution to an immediate problem — the rain. This realisation was a watershed moment (excuse the pun), underscoring the essence of Service Design. It wasn’t about the umbrella itself but the solution it represented when you needed it the most.

Shifting Mindsets: From Product to Service

The challenge was monumental. Embedding a service design function within a tech company, especially at the Series B stage, required more than just skill and expertise; it demanded a mindset transformation. My remit involved educating, inspiring, and, most importantly, demonstrating the tangible value of adopting a service-oriented approach.

We needed to transcend the conventional “make and sell” mentality and embrace a philosophy where the emphasis was on creating value through solutions tailored to our customer’s needs at the moment of need. This was not just a strategic pivot but a fundamental change in how we perceived our role in the customers’ journey.

The Service Design Mandate: Cultivating a New Perspective

Service design, in this context, was akin to being a forensic detective — meticulously analysing every touchpoint, identifying unmet needs, and uncovering opportunities, discovering the root cause of various problems. This wasn’t merely about designing services; it was about crafting moments that resonated on a personal and emotional level with our users but also ensuring that the engine backstage powered those moments efficiently.

My role was to champion this cause, to build champions across the entire organisation that could bridge the gap between what was and what could be. Twelve months prior, there were no journeys mapped. By the end of my tenure, we had 75 journeys mapped across the customer lifecycle.

Humble insights from experience

Through my journey of bootstrapping a service design function within a tech startup, I’ve gathered insights that are worthy of reflection and as a foundation for further exploration and learning.

• Leadership-Driven Service Design: Successful integration of service design requires a top-down initiative anchored in the company’s vision and goals. Starting from a broad perspective and then narrowing down to specifics — while maintaining the ability to zoom in and out as necessary — is crucial.
• Cross-Departmental Orchestration: When service design is confined to a single department, it’s challenging to implement across the organisation due to perceived biases and hidden agendas. A company-wide approach, led by leadership, facilitates pragmatic and unbiased execution.
• Data-Driven Truth-Seeking: The cornerstone of a data-driven culture is its unwavering commitment to seeking the truth, avoiding the pitfalls of cherry-picking data or distorting the system. Service Designers play a pivotal role in fostering this culture, ensuring that input and output metrics genuinely reflect the customer experience.
• Democratising Service Design: Encouraging every member of the organisation to think like a service designer democratises the discipline, spreading its principles without the need to form a large specialised team. This approach not only broadens the understanding of service design but also embeds its methodologies more deeply within the company’s culture.
• Centralising Journey Management for Cohesion and Scalability: Without a centralized and scalable journey management framework, organisations lack a unified source of truth, leading to misalignment and fragmented efforts. Implementing scalable journey management is crucial for aligning teams across the organization, ensuring everyone works towards a singular, customer-centric goal, and enabling measurable impact on user experience.
• Advocating a Service-Dominant Mindset: Emphasising the importance of not just creating teams labeled as ‘customer-centric’, e.g., Customer Success, but fostering a mindset where the product is the totality of the entire experience: visible and invisible. This approach aligns more closely with the essence of customer-centricity, avoiding the pitfalls of siloed teams and promoting a more integrated, holistic view of providing experiences that solve problems for customers when they most need it.

As I continue my quest to take incremental steps in integrating service design within organisations, the essence of being a forensic detective remains a constant: to be deeply curious, relentlessly inquisitive, and rigorously analytical. This path demands more than mere adoption of methodologies; it requires a fundamental shift towards questioning deeper truths beneath the customer experience, fostering cross-departmental collaboration, and democratising the principles of service design across every level. By continuously probing, questioning, and refining our approach, we unlock the transformative potential of service design to not only redefine offerings but also to cultivate a culture of innovation, empathy, and alignment toward a unified vision of customer-centric excellence.