Service Design-in’ at Tesco
An asynchronous interview with Mauro D’Alessandro, Design Lead at Tesco.
Q: Ciao Mauro, please introduce yourself.
A: My name is Mauro D’Alessandro, I’m a Design Lead in the Technology department at Tesco Stores, I now manage a team of 5 Seniors (1 SD, 2 UX, 1 UI and 1 Researcher). Tesco is the largest grocery and general merchandise retailer in the UK, with more than 420,000 global employees (UK, Central Europe and India) across Tesco Stores and its subsidiaries: Tesco Bank, Tesco Mobile and its clothing brand F&F.
Tesco Stores has 3 design organisations, connected but reporting to different business areas:
- Customer Serve & Product (CSP), the one my team belongs to. It covers customer-facing online and in-store touchpoints
- Enterprise covers colleagues and suppliers facing experiences
- Tesco Labs operates as a design function for the Central Innovation Team
Tesco Bank and Tesco Mobile also have their design teams.
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: I usually explain and sometimes sell internally, Service Design, based on 3 main dimensions. One thing to keep in mind is that the context in which I and my team operate is very much product-driven and influenced by the proximity and the needs of a pretty big UX team, which we support and in some cases help to join the dots with other parts of the business. Some of my definitions might not apply to other contexts, but I’ll do my best to generalise without oversimplifying.
These three dimensions are (not in order of importance):
- The breadth — Service Design as a telescope that allows enlarging the field of view on the potential value that a business or an institution can bring into the world. The best Service Designers I worked with are people with a great ability to “zoom out”, to be able to think about the journey as a cycle that runs beyond the interaction with the brand or institution.
- The depth — Service Design as a shovel that allows digging under the surface, in the unsexy depths of Dark Matter, to quote one of my favourite books (Trojan Horse and the Dark Matter, by Dan Hill). I am a pretty stubborn advocate of design generalists in this sense: to go full-on in the Dark Matter you need brave and curious people who can ask, understand and visualise how things work and why, who can understand many languages, and can facilitate complex multidisciplinary conversations.
- The connections — Service Design as a fil rouge that joins the dots between different teams: building relationships is paramount for a team to be able to design a good service. This is something I used to underestimate before becoming a team leader, and I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to learn so much from the people in my team, their ability to glue people together, to facilitate the flow of information to make collaboration feel like fun. I think this is something incredibly valuable.
Q: What’s the current Service Design set up at your company?
A: When I first joined Tesco, I was looking after Store-Colleagues propositions: essentially all the digital tools that our colleagues use in their daily jobs, from food waste reduction routines, to store security systems, to real-time internal communication. These are typical service design challenges and we managed to introduce some basic and effective Service Design practices, mainly mapping existing process clusters and surfacing opportunities to streamline the collaboration between products. Our support started to be useful to other teams traditionally more UX focused, we helped the Loyalty & Support team in the first phases of a big project focused on enabling self-serve product returns via digital touchpoints.
After the last reorganisation in April 2021, the Store-Colleagues team has been handed over to our Enterprise department, consolidating the whole colleague experience under a single organisation, and I was given the chance to build a new “horizontal” design capability under CSP, that would support the 3 “vertical” product teams (Inspire&Choose; Fulfil&Pay; Loyalty&Support) and integrate some service thinking within the more traditional product-driven, Agile workflows. This means including colleagues, customers and in some cases suppliers in the research scope, or in other cases taking into account the customer experience impact of backend systems that were originally conceived only as an internal service.
Service Design is still a bit of an outlier, thanks to many successful projects delivered in the last year (I’m thinking about the incredible results achieved around food waste reduction), the company recognises the massive value of its methodologies and its mindset, but it is not yet matured to the point that we have recognised Service Designers nor Service Design career paths.
Q: You keep referring to the food waste initiative. Tell me more about it. What was great about it?
A: Tesco’s company purpose is “Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day”. As part of this commitment, one of the main challenges is the growing zero food waste target, this year the business is challenging itself to re-distribute 85% of all edible food surplus (OOC) by quarter 4. These environmental targets remain an important driver in the overall business plan.
From the Store perspective, there are 3 main workstreams that contribute to this target:
- Price reduction routines: specific price scanning routines that aim to implement progressive price reductions during the day and therefore facilitate the distribution of specific categories of food.
- Colleague shop: a distribution channel that allows store colleagues to buy food surplus at low prices.
- Charity partnerships, a communication channel that facilitates the collaboration between stores and charities in their food collection at the end of the day.
Obviously, these projects are still ongoing, but during the first months of the pandemic, the team worked incredibly hard to adapt ways of working and do not stop the store trials.
Having contributed to such an ambitious achievement is something we’re incredibly proud of.
Q: What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at Tesco?
A: Working as a team leader in such a massive business, I like to think more about people working together, rather than disciplines working together, and I like to encourage my team members to push themselves beyond the boundaries of their job title.
For us, this meant establishing clear responsibilities and relationships between roles without creating siloes. I saw that this approach had a great impact on collaboration: if a Product Owner or a UI Designer are asked to support Service Designers or Researchers during a discovery activity, they will automatically learn where the emerging insights are coming from, they contribute to the sensemaking phase, they become advocates, and last but not least, they learn new valuable design skills. We found that building this kind of collective knowledge is the best way to advocate Service Design across the business.
Q: Your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on? What are the most unsexy bits you ever worked on? What are the bits you are most proud of?
A: Right now my team is working on what I call shared experiences: these are components of our digital products that are either used (i.e. a mobile component on our mobile app’s home screen that displays the different delivery methods, such as whoosh, click and collect, etc.) or accessed (i.e. the home screen of our mobile app, which is an orchestration of content from different business areas) by other teams.
This is not a typical Service Design challenge, but having service design minds in the team was absolutely instrumental to gather and make sense of such a large and fragmented amount of constraints and interact simultaneously with all the teams who contribute and hold stakes in the mobile app home screen.
The most unsexy project was also one of those I was most proud of: a scanning system that would help colleagues go through price reductions routines in-store easily and in less time. These kinds of price reductions are a fundamental part of the company’s effort to reduce food waste, and it was incredibly rewarding to see the amazing results the team was able to achieve. Measuring the impact of this initiative proved tricky: we couldn’t use the time saved as a clear/clean indicator, because there are too many variables going on that could affect quantitative measures, therefore we implemented before and after surveys and ran colleagues’ interviews.
Q: Service design impact. How do you prove the impact of Service Design?
A: Right now we don’t have specific Service Design performance indicators, but in the Store -Colleagues area, on top of product-specific KPIs, we do have colleagues and customer satisfaction indicators.
Like I said there’s a lot of work to do, but I think that the most evident and rewarding indicator of impact is to see how happy our stakeholders are to join our workshop, and how quickly they become advocates, even when the topic is rather unsexy.
Q: Service design advocacy. How do you educate your organisation on the Service Design approach?
A: One of the first things I did when I joined Tesco was to pull together a shiny looking deck that explained how revolutionary and eye-opening Service Design would be for the business. What I realised was that the best I could get out of those conversations was… a few good conversations, people understand what you’re trying to do but I guess in a tech-driven organisation like ours, you really need to show them rather than tell them.
I started to read between the lines of the briefs I was receiving and slowly tried to understand how to respond to them with something more than a list of design outputs and activities, so we started applying Service Design, achieving results and then having conversations about the benefits of our approach.
Q: What’s the future for Service Design in your organisation?
A: We’re seeing the emergence of themes that require complex problem solving, the ability to facilitate access to food to an unprecedented number of people regardless of the channel, the ability to collaborate and facilitate consensus between stakeholders with different fluencies and objectives, and above all to keep customers, communities and the planet (to quote our new company purpose statement) at the centre of our strategies.
I think Service Designers and more in general, what we call Service Design mindset, ticks all the boxes and more. Like I mentioned above, we as a company have a lot of work to do in terms of Design maturity in general, and recognising, including and developing Service Design capabilities will be part of this path.
Q: A service you wish you had designed
A: There are definitely a lot of them, and I keep seeing great improvements in service accessibility and those are a really big inspiration in my daily job.
If I have to pick one, I admit that the first time I used Uber I thought that was gonna change the world and I really wish I had designed it.
Q: How can people follow you?
A: Linkedin is best. https://www.linkedin.com/in/maurodalessandro/
Service Design-in’ is a collection of thoughts and interviews with Service Designers working within organisations. If you want to share your views, please reach out.
