Izac Ross, Service and Product Design

Thoughts

Hiring Service Designers: The 3 Archetypes

Service design is still a nascent field. There are many who call themselves service designers, that do not have a formal background. As service designers, the primary deliverable is process and strategy. However, the real art of the role is translating those insights into tangible, implementable changes that positively impact customer experience and business metrics. A service designer that stops at strategy may succeed in a large organization. In smaller organizations that might not work.

As a hiring manager, it is helpful to identify what you need out of a service designer, matching that to the types of designers on the market, and how to target the right background through your job description. Hopefully, this article will help you target your search and identify what archetype to recruit.

What is service design?

Economics draws clear distinctions between goods and services:

  • Goods are tangible and consumable; think what an industrial designer designs.

  • Services are instantaneous exchanges that are intangible and do not result in ownership. Think doctor's appointments, flights, banking, and education.

This distinction gets a bit blurry today between goods and services. Many "products" are in the middle; think SAAS products. Most delivery organizations are siloed by products and channels (mobile, web, phone, support, marketing) and have few resources devoted to knitting those channels and products together. Many organizations' resources (time, budget, logistics) are spent on customer-facing outputs. The internal processes—including the experience of the organization's employees—are overlooked; service design focuses on matching these internal processes to the value proposition the organization is trying to delivery to customers.

Service design is the act of planning and organizing a business's operating resources (people, props, and processes) to improve the employee's experience and therefore improve the customer's experience by better arranging these resources to be human-centered. The goal is threefold: to improve customer metrics (NPS, CSAT, CES, etc.), to increase employee satisfaction, and to reduce cost of delivery/increase service revenue.

What are the backgrounds of service designers?

Service design academic programs are fairly new. There are a few degree programs in service design, including those at Savannah College of Art & Design, School of Visual Arts, Royal College of Art, and KISD. However, the oldest degree programs are less than 15 years old.

This means most practicing service design do not have a formal education but are converts to these methods from industrial design, product design, interaction design, design research, or architectural backgrounds. It's common as well for some to come from the business side, and often folks from continuous improvement, operational excellence, and customer experience teams might call themselves service designers as well. Each of these backgrounds ends up mapping to 3 archetypes. As a recruiter or leader, you will quickly find these three patterns

  • The Maker

  • The Insight Generator

  • The Continuous Improver

Ideally, one candidate can fulfill all these of skills, but in practice most candidates lean fall into one of these archetypes. This may look familiar to those who experienced the maturing of the product design community over the last decade. In the early 2000s, there was a lack of maturity in degree programs for product design. It took a combination of interaction design, visual design, and user research techniques to arrive at the generalist product designer of the late 2010s. It will be interesting to see where service design goes and what it will be called 10 years from now.

Overview of the 3 archetypes

🎭

The Maker

Typical backgrounds: Industrial design, Service design degree from an Art School, Interior architecture, Retail Design

Typical Strengths

  • Craft to make convincing touchpoints and help build out service touchpoints

  • Strong prototyper

  • Human-centered design

  • Systems design

  • Usually, strong generative research skills

  • Strong facilitators

  • Service value propositions and improvement

  • Can build strong human-centered pilots

  • Strong brand experience POV

Typical Weaknesses

  • Generally lacks change management skills

  • May struggle with talking to business functions

  • Lacks solid data and metrics skills

Signals in recruiting

In Portfolio / Case studies

  • Focus on problems in the consumer and employee journey

  • Work starts at the insights and facilities through journeys

  • Strong ability to operationalize insights into people, props, and process

  • Has 1-2 strong areas of craft in other disciplines.

On Resume

  • Has likely held industrial, product, interior, or interaction design positions

  • Might only have an undergrad, and that is ok

💡

The Insight Generator

Typical backgrounds: UX Researcher, Social sciences

Typical Strengths

  • Generative User Research

  • Systems thinking

  • Strong facilitators

  • Opportunity identification

  • Service value proposition generation

  • Can translate insights across the business

  • Strong customer services data skills

Typical Weaknesses

  • Generally lacks craft skills and will need to rely on resources from other teams to visualize futures

  • Generally, cannot build and pilot new services

  • Generally lacks change management and operational skills

Signals in recruiting

In Portfolio / Case studies

  • Cases look more like a design researcher or UX research

  • Focuses on workshops or facilitation

  • Focuses on the dissemination of information across the org

  • Is missing the next step after the insights

  • Does not have the craft to communicate their ideas in touchpoint form

On Resume

  • Has user research or design research roles on resume

  • Has a social science background

  • Generally has a master's degree

📏

The Continuous Improver

Typical Backgrounds: Operational excellence, Process / continual improvement, Six Sigma, service design degrees with in management or business schools, MBAs in management science or hospitality

Typical Strengths

  • Strong customer experience data skills

  • Strong change management skills

  • Strong process improvement skills

  • Knows how to speak the language of the business

  • Often can build financial and operational models

  • Translates to business functions well

Typical Weaknesses

  • Does not have craft skills or ability to create differentiated Human-centered pilots and visualize futures

  • Lacks brand lens on service design

  • Will assistance of user research for 100% of studies

Signals in recruiting

In Portfolio / Case studies

  • Might not have a portfolio

  • Will be a set of diagrams only

  • Will focus on outcomes

  • Will likely put together a case study that is more written in form than visual

On Resume

  • Heavy background in operations roles

  • Customer experience, product operations, or customer insights functions, HR or business process engineering

  • Has some experience in workforce planning and data analysis

  • Has some sort of efficiency training like six-sigma

  • Likely to have an MBA, or master industrial anthropology or organizational development

Advice for hiring managers

Take a step back, and look where your organization is struggling to get services right. What are your organization's weaknesses and strengths?

  • For an organization that has high customer satisfaction (NPS, CSAT, CES) and a solid connected digital product org, and a high cost of goods sold (COGs), a continuous improver might be the right call.

  • For organizations that struggle to identify why customer satisfaction is low but COGs are low, the insight generator might be the right archetype.

  • For an organization where the silos of the organization are shown in the services and products, or you're going into entirely new business lines, the maker might be the right archetype.

Remember, each of the archetypes profiles require different supports as well.

  • The continuous improver and the insight generator will both need to be paired with designers to execute their ideas into touchpoints and visualize their vision.

  • The continuous improver will need strong user researchers to balance their business mindset.

  • The maker will need a strong operational partner to help them understand the operational data, predict costs, and communicate the business case.

Make sure your first hire has the right resources dedicated to the service design initiative to ensure every hire is set up for success. 

As your service design function grows beyond three, it's necessary to balance the team with folks from other backgrounds, and the folks from the new backgrounds can help to up skill other designers skill gaps and vise vera. Happy hiring.

Izac Ross