Service Design-in’ at John Lewis and Partners
An asynchronous interview with Chiara Parodi, Head of Experience and Service Design at John Lewis and Partners.
Q: Ciao Chiara, please introduce yourself.
A: My name is Chiara Parodi, and I currently head up the Experience and Service Design team at John Lewis and Partners.
I joined John Lewis 2 and a half years ago, after spending more than a decade at Vodafone, first in the Italian market and then at the Global Headquarters.
Before becoming a Service Designer, I held several different roles: from customer care to knowledge management, content management, process improvement, customer experience and user research. All these roles have helped me bring different perspectives to my service design approach.
Q: What does John Lewis & Partners do?
A: John Lewis & Partners is a British brand of high-end department stores operating throughout the United Kingdom. John Lewis began trading over 150 years ago in 1864 on London’s Oxford Street and is now a leading omni-channel retailer in the UK with 34 John Lewis shops and a growing online business.
The brand sells general merchandise as part of the John Lewis Partnership, which also owns the supermarket chain Waitrose and offers a range of financial products such as home insurance and a credit card through John Lewis Finance.
The John Lewis Partnership is the UK’s largest employee-owned business.
Q: How did you get into Service Design?
A: I got into Service Design because of a Company reorganisation, almost by chance.
I was working at Vodafone Italy, in a team that was disbanded, with a hybrid role between Customer Experience and Content Management.
As a result of this change, I was temporarily reallocated to the UX/UI team who were at the time just starting to be involved in a huge project on Digital Transformation. I took the lead on that project working alongside a big design agency and collaborating daily with user researchers and service designers.
I knew the approach already as the whole CX team had attended some training in Design Thinking and Service Design, but that project was the opportunity to see it applied on a larger scale and at a professional level. That project prompted us to reshape the UX/UI team including user research and service design as disciplines, and create an internal Design Studio.
Needless to say, I found my calling! Since then I have broadened my horizons and explored other user-centred design disciplines — but my heart has picked its favourite.
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: The word that most often comes to mind when I think about service design is ‘interpret’ which we can use in two distinctive ways:
- Service Design is a way to interpret the world we live in from a user perspective,
- Service Design is a ‘multi-discipline’, a multidimensional approach that gets its tools from several different other professions — experience design, user research, process improvement, and system architecture to name a few — and thanks to that, a service designer becomes an interpreter who knows different languages and helps the different actors involved in a service understand each other.
As a consequence of this, I’ve found that these intersections between disciplines and professions can generate different nuances of service designers.
What I mean is that aside from the tools used by Service Design, the skills of Service Design are not unique to it, and that is why it’s so difficult to enclose SD in a simple definition.
If there were to be a ‘unicorn’ in the design space, to me that’s the service designer who knows about human-centred design, business, technology, operations, user research, user experience, content management and more. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think a service designer needs to be a pro at all of them, but has an understanding of these elements and knows how to use them at different levels.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at your company?
A: Within John Lewis, Service Design is embedded into the Omnichannel Product directorate and works alongside Experience Design, UI Design, UX Writing and User Research.
It became a defined discipline a bit less than 3 years ago, and the team has quickly grown to the current (small) size within the first year or so.
There are 4 service designers in total, all senior enough to work on complex omnichannel propositions and projects involving numerous other teams and stakeholders. When we started, we worked as a single team with a shared backlog, however, we realised that this wasn’t an effective way of working because we weren’t leveraging existing knowledge and relationships.
Since August 2023, each service designer has been assigned to a different product area, aligned with a Head of Product and looking after several product teams. This change hasn’t just reinforced our relationships but has allowed us to participate more closely in long-term planning and prioritisation activities.
We however still share a backlog of projects to allow for flexibility in the case of one area becoming busier than another.
In terms of approach, Service design is still a defined practice, although we already have several ambassadors and our ambition is to make it more and more a shared mindset, at least for now, within our directorate — ideally one day it will be wider than that.
Q: What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at John Lewis?
A: Service designers collaborate with user research, experience design, UX writing and product daily. We are also extremely lucky to have a Resourcing Manager who helps assess what disciplines are needed — and for how long or in what capacity — for each project.
A service designer typically works on one or two projects at a time, alongside a Product Lead or one or more Product Managers who are accountable for the related product areas. Occasionally we support initiatives led by other areas of the business such as Retail, Trade and Merchandising, and Financial Services to name a few.
From a design perspective, on heavily digital projects we pair up with an experience designer, and occasionally with a UX writer. On top of that, we interact quite a lot with the customer experience team for more strategic and cross-functional initiatives and workstreams.
Given the size of the business, we also collaborate with numerous other disciplines such as service architects, business analysts, process managers, data and insight managers, and SMEs across several teams. Stakeholder maps, although not the sexiest, are one of the most important tools we use on each project.
As in any large organisation, there are a few grey areas and overlaps that give us a bit of a headache, therefore setting clear roles and responsibilities with other teams at the beginning of each project is a key activity for everyone’s peace of mind.
Q: Let’s talk about your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on?
A: We typically work on initiatives led by product, spanning across multiple channels and teams. Some examples: loyalty, payments, category or season-specific journeys, customer service across touchpoints, apps evolution.
The project I am most proud of was about creating a new ecosystem of payments in-store concepts; I loved it because it was strategic but tangible, and involved many interesting areas of the business such as store operations, profit protection, store design, app development and many more. It has been a truly omnichannel piece of work.
On top of that, we had great fun with the PM, the experience design Manager and the UX researcher going to John Lewis stores, speaking to lots of colleagues who work in different roles and organising service safari afternoons.
The most unsexy must be a project on bladed items: due to the Offensive Weapons Act, retailers must comply with several requirements in order to be able to sell bladed items such as verifying buyers' age and labelling packages — not much room to run a discovery, but lots of implementation puzzles!
Q: How do you educate your organisation on the Service Design approach?
A: When we started we focussed on preparing a simple playbook that summarises the main principles and what to expect from a service design-led project in terms of approach and activities.
Last year we have been focussing on educating our directorate, and using our recurrent stakeholder sessions and existing sharing sessions to share more of our work.
We have also started to organise short interviews with stakeholders who have already worked with us and amongst other questions, we ask them to tell us what they understand of service design after working with us — we are planning to use the result to help support our narrative and the language we use to talk about our discipline.
In all honesty, the current year has been extremely busy from a project perspective and we’ve parked the education and upskilling plans for a couple of months — my expectation is that we’ll think bigger this time, leveraging company-wide initiatives to expand our audience.
Q: A service you wish you had designed
A: I wish I had designed the UK COVID19 vaccination service: such a complex service for the whole population with digital and physical experiences involved and multiple actors to be coordinated, in a short amount of time. I have looked into other European countries’ systems and processes and none were comparable to the efficiency and ease of use of the British one.
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. If you want to share your views, please reach out.
