Service designers need to think like founders
In the last 9 years I have been working in the field of service and strategic design. It’s an upcoming field of design that more companies are applying to design new business propositions.
During this time, I had the pleasure to work in different setups as a service designer:
1. In house service designer in a corporate
2. Service designer in a design agency
3. Service design professor in a university
4. Service design manager in a consultancy
5. Service designer in my two startups
It is important to mention that service designer is just a tag, and tags might become confusing. We do not need frontiers in design. Your skills define your scope and the impact that you can deliver from pixel to business strategy.
In this adventure I have grown personally and professionally:
I have experienced the greatest professional moments, (awards, implementation of amazing projects…) and the worst client rejections, need of firing people, acknowledge my responsibility on stupid decisions and an endless list of learnings and scars.
In 2023, I can say loudly that I am a different professional. More mature with a wider view of the challenges and capable to analyze the micro and macro contexts to figure out how to connect the inputs in new to the world value propositions.
In every stage of my service design career I have learnt so much. However, in my current phase, as a cofounder of two tech startups, my evolution reached a new level. Why did it happen? After looking back, I found five reasons:
Become a builder, not a consultant.
You need to have the passion to bring the product to life, it is not just another project to be paid for. It’s a matter of mindset and commitment.
It is the thin line between advice and execution. Consultants advice, builders execute. And the value is in the execution side because you are validating impact on live.
A new service is a start up.
It is valuable to analyze with visual tools like customer journeys, blueprints and personas, but if you do not connect it with the reality of the business with an actionable plan in a minimum scale, it will be useless. We are fortunate because we are well programmed to start understanding the users and this represents a great starting point. The goal of a new service is to find Product Market Fit. And this process is very hard. The objective is to find a concrete problem for a specific user. You need to know if this problem is a real pain.
Example:
Problem: I cannot open a bank account in dollars in Colombia
User: Companies, SME, startups.
Solution: Bank account in dollars for SMEs in Colombia
It is not that easy, sorry. You found the problem and the interested user, but the initial value proposition most of the times is wrong. Your hypothesis are flawed. There are so many nuances that affect the user adoption of your service, and you need to validate them asap.
Example of nuances: I am scared to have my company’s money in the bank , or I do not use my phone to manage my finances.
UX research and no code prototypes are probably the best tools to find Product Market Fit understanding the whole range of nuances to define your service value proposition. Service details are extremely important because they might become barriers for your users’ adoption. Several small barriers create a friction that block your service to be used and therefore acquire users willing to pay.
Implementation is what makes the difference.
Conceptualization is easy. You could be more or less creative and you will figure out an interesting solution. The hard part is execution, that’s why 93% of startups fail, and I assume that new services might have similar performance. Questions like: How do I run the value proposition of my digital service with 50 USD for a month? Limitations could be a boost for creativity, take it from the positive side and challenge yourself.
There is a huge difference between having a blueprint in your hands or receiving 4 user rejections of your shitty service. The first one is static, the latter is action.
Measuring = Improvement and growth
Measuring a service is not trivial, but it is so insightful. There are different touchpoints involved in an average service and a long sequence of user actions from the onboarding to the recommendation or return. A mature service designer must establish and manage meaningful metrics for the service. Establishing the right metrics is a strategic endeavor done together with the team (business, marketing and product) A good understanding of acquisition funnels, churn rate, retention, user cohorts… are essential to set a solid basis to improve your service.
You role will be fluent, hybrid and adaptable.
Don’t try to fit into a certain role, focus on the impact that you can bring to your team, to the service and eventually to the user. Service designers are connectors and orchestrators of stakeholder value. We provide different types of value along the user experience in several touchpoints to form gradually the whole value proposition of the service. Service designers need to own responsibility like product owners, need to manage and prioritize like product managers, need to guide the service vision like founders and need to understand the user like UX researchers. You will flow within teams and organizations, with a builder mindset, an implementation driven approach, a measurement obsession and a deep passion to understand users behavioral nuances.
