“What were you (service designer) asked to do here?”
Fast forward 3 years to read about what happened: here.
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After my first 9 months in-house at a tech company, I can safely say I’ve made some friends in the team: product managers, agile coaches, engineers, some fellow designers too!
Friendship is nice because people feel safe to speak openly to each other. Last week for example, an engineer asked me (with open, kind, genuine curiosity): ‘What did the company ask you to do here?’.
The question wasn’t harsh or rude, because in all honesty, he didn’t know! Like himself, engineers haven’t seen me in daily stand ups, retros or story refinements for months. This is because early on, I saw no value in interrupting their day to day with end-to-end customer experience work so I took off in a tangent of work.
This may be a good time to explain that I am the first service designer in the company, in the platform, among plenty a-product teams. Recently, a second service designer has joined, which is fantastic because we’re proving that holistic, collaborative, visual, sequential thinking adds value.
Having explained that, let’s go back to the question. A couple of days after receiving and reflecting on one of the most honest questions anyone’s asked me at work, a product manager also said: ‘How should I be working with UX? I’ve never built a customer facing feature and I’d like to pick your brain on how to do it please.”
I found this one endearing, and an opening to prepare some slides (in literally 15 minutes) and jump on a call. I took this opportunity to explain how a product manager and a UX’er could collaborate on such a feature. I am looking forward to being that designer (UX’er? Service Designer? What’s my name?) in this project and loose the slides. In the future, I’d like to turn those slides into a real-world outcome to share with others, as an example of what we can achieve together.
I’ve thought about the situations above a lot, and gathered two key learnings:
- What I do is not clear to all engineers
- How to work with me is not clear to all product managers
Being fair to engineers
Engineers and technical colleagues have explained their roles to me and through their day to day ceremonies given me a glimpse of how they are building an amazing platform. Considering there’s 200+ of them, I don’t think I’ll be able to explain what I do before the end of the year…or next. Plus that’s obviously not the point.
Instead, having noticed that there is a gap between me and the makers, I’m motivated to work side by side with them. Especially since it’s September and smashing our end of year goals would be nice!
I need (for morale) to show engineers what I can bring to their table — fast. This doesn’t mean I’ll work on a single feature or forget all about the strategic work that needs to happen at a platform level (across many product teams). It means I’ll have at least one UX project going, where I can ship something into the real world and feel I’m showing what I do… not having to explain myself (to myself).
Being fair to product managers
I’ve been very successful working with product managers who know we share a concern for the user’s experience and know how to leverage the power of design. Be it research, prototyping or testing. In a recent experience, one of them was happy to let me lead on a discovery and an ideation session that led to loads of solutions. We then turned the feasible flow into an MVP and broke into work-streams to investigate further. I’ve been working on the desirability and usability of the idea for example whilst another pair is working on the technical feasibility of the ideal new process.
To me, this is an example of a dream dynamic. I understand it’s not yet the norm, and that it may take time to come out natural. But it’s there, it’s happening.
Being fair to myself
My suspicion is that measuring my success in ‘features pushed live’ or what ‘measurable’ / ‘immediate’ improvement in the customer experience I’ve caused is short sighted.
It may well be that the role of the first service designers in an agile tech organisation is to build capabilities first — nothing else. To invite and embed small but lasting change. To take on projects that proof the value of what we do in practice, rather than in pretty artefacts on the wall (I did a service map. Sue me.)
Calling for the big conversations to happen will still be on my agenda of course. Facilitating the vision work, the visualisation of what is to be the future — all still my jam. However… I have a bunch of colleagues with questions… and staring whilst holding my green bucket (see picture above) is not my style.
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Fast forward 3 years to read about what happened: here.
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Tweet me, email me, snoop on my work… tell me how to be better.
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Thank you for reading.
