Service Design-in’ at A2A
An asynchronous interview with Valeria Verardi, Service Design Lead at A2A.
Q: Ciao Valeria, please introduce yourself.
A: Hi, I’m Valeria, Service Design Lead at A2A, a passionate and enthusiastic designer and researcher based in Milan.
I changed my job position less than one year ago and now, I think I’m in a “happy phase” of my professional career, in which I feel the real potentiality of working as a Service Designer.
This moment has been deeply shaped by my academic background and my work experiences.
Q: What are your academic background and the work experiences you’re referring to?
A: After a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Design, I decided to achieve a Double Master’s Degree in Product & Service System Design and Management Engineering. I started my career as an academic design researcher working with professors, PhD students and partner companies, and we applied service design methodologies to engage employees in the co-creation of their companies’ vision and organizational direction.
When I joined Fjord, the design company that represented one of the dream realities of any Service Designer of that time. Here, I learned a lot.
I was in a team of designers only (service, UX, UI), working for international clients in different industries. My Service Design role was well-defined, and I had the opportunity to grow a lot.
After some years, in which I experienced several organizational evolutions, acquiring more and more of a strategic view of business dynamics and objectives, I began to desire to go deeper into the real implications of my design outcomes for the client companies and their users.
I needed a change. I wanted to dirty my hands more, to touch more concretely how Service Design could impact people’s lives and their interactions in today’s world. So I decided to switch, to experiment with Service Design inside one single corporate organization: A2A.
Q: What does A2A do?
A: A2A is an Italian multiservice company that provides services in the energy, environment, and smart city sectors. For example, it provides electricity and gas supply, waste management systems, environmental services and products and services for energy efficiency, circular economy, electric mobility and smart cities. The promotion of circular use of resources in all these fields is the reason why we define A2A as a “Life company”.
It is a well-structured ecosystem, divided into sub-areas and departments that work in synergy, to provide a bunch of sustainable and efficient services to both citizens and other companies.
I joined A2A in 2023 in the Digital Hub team, part of the A2A innovation area, which represents a little (and young) hub for innovation across the whole organization.
Q: How did you get your job?
A: I searched a lot before finding this role. Service Design specific positions were few in Italy, and they were opened mostly by consultancy companies, that know Service Design well. So, I tried to apply also to “related” job positions such as User Research, UX, and Interaction Design, looking for companies in different industries and sectors.
In the end, I was lucky: A2A was looking for a Service Designer to address social and environmental purposes and I applied. There was a good match for both parties. My background in Service Design helped, together with my Management Engineering experience and Communication Design bachelor: competencies that are all necessary for the position I hold.
Now, I understand that this one was exactly the right path for me: from consultancy to corporate. Looking back, working in a consultancy empowered me to grow my skill set, and I am now better placed to work in a corporate because of that.
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: Since design is “giving meaning to things”, Service Design is giving sense to experiences, taking care of people, touchpoints, and all that is behind it. It is a set of approaches, tools, and mindsets that, with enough time and resources, can generate value and impact for both customers and brands.
For me, Service Design is the key to giving voice to users and business needs, which are combined in a structured process that brings out new opportunities for products and services. It is also a way to build these new experiences, giving them a functional and emotional meaning to satisfy the initial needs. It is a circle… to improve experiences, and when you’re lucky, to generate something new.
I deeply believe that Service Design is one of the disciplines that have the potential, competencies, and strengths to evolve or directly change any field in this world.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at your company?
A: There are many different designers in A2A, spread over various pillars and departments. But only in recent years, Service Design has been valued and required.
In my team, we are two Service Design leads, who manage different projects across the whole organization. To do so, we bring in external design consultants who help us with research activities, Service Design, UX/UI Design, and MVP to be tested with final users. And all together we carry on the project’s output.
This means that as Service Designers our focus is on collaboration across all the design competencies needed, including User Research and UX/UI design. The big advantage is that we have an overview of everything: from the outcome to the direct consequences of what we design. Having this role empowers us to improve iteratively our experiences, making a real difference, in a concrete and impactful way.
Q: What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at A2A?
A: My team is a small innovation hub across the whole A2A. We detect opportunities for improvement in different A2A areas and we collect project proposals for collaboration with the business units. Meetings and workshops are essential to engage each business unit in every step of the process, deciding together which is the best direction for the project, and designing together the most adequate solutions for both internal and external users’ needs.
As a part of the Innovation pillar, inside the Corporate business unit, my team collaborates with other innovation experts to create synergies in the projects, and with other corporate experts (e.g. infrastructure, communication) to build solutions that are integrated with our systems and coherent with A2A style and tone of voice.
Going deeper inside my Digital Hub team, I daily work with Data Experts, Tech Leads, and Scrum Masters, because we are all involved in every single project following an agile approach.
At the beginning of every project, we collaborate to understand the project objective and timing and to set phases and activities that focus on design, data, and tech. Then, each of us manages our area and sub-team — I craft the design process and build the design team with consultants. Working in Agile allows us to work all together, to periodically check the output designed in each sprint, to make development outcomes integrated and coherent with design and data, and to create 360-degree validated Minimum Viable Products that can be tested before the final launch.
Q: Let’s talk about your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on?
A: As a Service Design Lead in the team, I am involved from the first “engagement” phase, in which we discuss and organize user needs, business requirements, and the objectives of the starting project, expressed by KPIs and OKR, together with the interested business units. To facilitate that, we often organize workshops to make them immediately get familiar with Service Design methodology.
Then, when we decide to begin the project, I set a specific design process with targeted activities, resources, and timeframes. I involve external design consultants who become my design team (diversifying in which phases of the project we need a service or a UX designer), and we work all together to carry on outcomes.
Each project has a different path, tools, and output, but in general, we follow the double-diamond (DD) approach mixed with design thinking phases (DT), personalizing methodology and outputs according to the desired experience to be designed.
One example is Energy Hub, one of my last projects, that started from user insights collected in previous research about NeN services, part of A2A.
We spotted interesting opportunities related to energy monitoring systems, from simplification to awareness, and control. We decided to deeply explore them through more detailed research: we involved the final users and analyzed the benchmark and emerging trends. The research results were then discussed in dedicated workshops in which we built user personas and mindsets, identified needs and opportunities, and co-created 4 personalized customer journeys.
These were fundamental for us to prioritize drivers and functionalities of a new service that we prototyped, developed, and tested, following a strategic roadmap crafted with the business stakeholders.
In this case, I set the design process you can see in the picture below, in which I as Service Design Lead involved other design roles in the different phases, and all together we directly got our hands dirty in each step, to carry out the desired results.
Q: How do you prove the impact of Service Design?
A: The answer is research. We use evaluative research when the product or service is tested or launched, to investigate the usability, effectiveness, quality, and so the impact of the designed experiences.
In my team, a quantitative approach is used by monitoring analytics and surveys that quantify the achievement of KPI and OKR set at the beginning of the project: this shows “what is the benefit” generated with the new product/service, with measurable metrics.
Equally, a qualitative approach is adopted by directly listening to users who used the designed solution through interviews or focus groups to detect “which benefits are generated” by the new service, their level of satisfaction, or the impact on their lives or daily tasks.
In the end, for us, both approaches are useful not only to measure the impact of Service Design output for our internal users and external clients but also the impact of our Digital Hub team in the whole A2A organization.
Q: How do you educate your organisation on the Service Design approach?
A: Since the concept of pure Service Design is quite new in my organization, while roles such as UX and UI designers are more common and understood for longer, the path to spread Service Design in the whole A2A is gradual and careful.
During projects, we introduce Service Design to all the business units with which we directly work, by sharing the process we are following, involving them in activities, engaging them through workshops, using Service Design tools to co-create with them in dedicated sessions, and trying to leverage even more on a user-centred approach.
In each phase, the impact and the value of Service Design are visible and tangible as a direct result of our involvement and collaboration together.
For example, we let stakeholders have a taste of Service Design since the engagement phase, collecting needs and requirements in a structured way and delivering an aligned direction and objective of the project; we involve them in the research activities defining the context to be explored and analyzing together the desk and user results to identify the right target; we co-ideate opportunities and co-create experiences, hypothesis, concepts that then we prioritize, prototype and test; and together we agree on the product that should be finally launched.
More in general, across the whole A2A, we promote training courses about Service Design, we share the results of the outcomes of our Service Design projects, and we offer Service Design workshops (as our investment) to every Business Unit interested in spreading the Service Design discipline and value, leveraging the potentiality of these tools and activities which could have a real impact on our projects.
Q: You mentioned the need for stakeholders to get familiar with Service Design. Why is that?
A: Yes, they absolutely need to get familiar with Service Design: for this reason, we need to show the impact of Service Design not only in the final output but throughout the Service Design process and activities.
A2A, like the majority of corporate companies, only recently is approaching Service Design.
Unlike consultancy companies, in which Service Design culture is well-affirmed and structured, companies such as A2A are in the middle of the learning process of Service Design value. My Digital Hub team, within the Innovation pillar, for now, is one of the few A2A areas in which Service Design is fully part of the process. So, to better collaborate with all the other A2A teams and departments, we have to show and prove the Service Design value, by actively involving stakeholders in all the design phases from the first parties of the project.
This educational aspect of our job is extremely important to have all the stakeholders on board and involved with the same commitment: the sooner they understand our way of working and appreciate the value, the potentiality, and the impact of every single design activity, the sooner they believe that we can concretely create together something that can make the difference.
Q: A service you wish you had designed
A: I greatly esteem digital health services such as Unobravo or Serenis. They are pioneers in a such delicate field as psychology in Italy.
We mentioned “impact” in the questions before. I like these services because, in my opinion, they have a great impact, bringing people closer to psychology services, which unluckily are still an inaccessible taboo for too many people.
And they did it well! Through easy and essential interactions that make the app user-friendly to any type of user, and that I tested as a user firsthand :)
I think this is a starting point in the long and difficult journey toward a more structured, digital-first and accessible health ecosystem that we absolutely need in Italy.
Q: How can people follow you?
A: On Linkedin!
Service Design-in’ is a collection of thoughts and interviews with Designers that adopt a service-design mindset working within organisations. Please reach out if you want to share your views.
