For the second session of the Service Design book club, we covered Chapters 3 and 4. These chapters focused on the importance of research and many techniques to gain customer insights.
For a new Product Manager, the techniques discussed in Chapter 4 are a great introduction to the tools in the discovery tool belt. And more important, these chapters stress the value of discovery in gaining insights that power service design decisions. As you train a new Product Manager, it’s helpful to take this same spirit of discovery in talking about new ideas that the new PM may have. Rather than dismissing a new idea due to your preconceived notions of what’s best, take the stance that the new idea is worth testing. Talk to the new PM about how their idea can be validated, either through existing data, interviewing internal stakeholders, or reaching out to customers. And be comfortable saying you don’t know what’s best. By showing how you go about learning and gaining customer insight, you’re teaching the new PM “how to fish” rather than giving them the “fish” of your prior experience.
As we covered this section at work, we had a fruitful conversation focusing on how our Customer Experience (CX) Team currently shares insights and how we could do it better. Our CX Team has a blog, and we knew we could drive more internal traffic to it. We talked about ideas such as adding new posts to Slack or Chatter and creating posters of valuable insights to distribute. As the HourSchool case study suggested, we also talked about ways to better ingrain CX into existing standing Services meetings to make customer insights a regular part of our services planning and give it continual focus.
If you are interested in using Service Design for you own book club, here are some discussion questions you can use for Chapters 3 & 4:
- Do you agree with the focus on qualitative over quantitative research? Is it better to get 100 insights or 10 truths from research? From the book: “Statistics are not very actionable for designers—we need to know the underlying reasons.”
- Do we utilize our internal staff enough when performing research? Are there ways we could utilize them better? From the book: “When time is short and a service improvement project has a limited budget, it is often a good idea to prioritize the research time with staff and data to dig quickly into the detail that is needed to design great services.”
- The HourSchool case study mentions that research became a regular part of meetings. Would it be beneficial to make research updates and recruiting a regular part of Service Team meetings? From the book “Announcing new classes, soliciting requests, and recruiting volunteer organizers are now standing agenda items.”
- As we learn about Service Design and create exciting improvements to our Services, how can we ensure our actions and momentum continue on? From the book: “Service innovation should have a lifespan beyond the length of time the service designers are involved in the project. This means recognizing that other stakeholders may engage in many of the activities of service design as part of a continual process of change.”
- Were there any discovery tools you’d like to try? Should we do a Service Safari together? Should we put together a Brand Sheet to use in discovery with customers?