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
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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
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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
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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.