The Curse of the Competent Service Designers / Chad & Jin / Inside Service Design #11
Service Design Show
Invisible work and enabling others
Chad reflects on the 'great enabler' role: coaching teammates and creating repeatable processes despite invisible credit.
What happens when a service design professional does their job well...
Usually? Absolutely nothing.
No organizational gears grind. No customers complain. No one panics.
You did your job, so the disaster simply stayed in your head instead of becoming a reality.
That’s the curse, though. No one's going to congratulate you for a crisis they didn't have to experience.
I sat down with Jin Wan and Chad Cheverier for the this episode of Inside Service Design to talk about this "great enabler" trap.
To make things practical, Jin had a great example about redesigning an onboarding journey. His biggest win wasn't a shiny new interface. It was moving a step in the verification process to the backend so nobody had to intervene manually. It saved the company (and customers) countless hours, but the solution itself is completely unseen.
Chad mentioned a similar struggle. Looking at his quarterly review and realizing he doesn't have many "shiny" deliverables to show. His best work was aligning teams and coaching PMs to do their jobs better, which doesn't look like a "deliverable".
So, how do you stay motivated when your best work is invisible and goes unnoticed? And more importantly, how do you sell the value of that work to the people holding the budget?
We unpack all of that in this episode.
If you had to make an estimate, how much of the work you do is "invisible"? Send me a quick reply and let me know.
Be well,
~ Marc
--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---
00:00 Welcome to February Round Up
05:00 Jin's path: From IT and HR to Marketing and CX
07:30 Chad's path: From photography to in-house design
10:45 What a CX professional does at a startup
11:45 Why you should ignore job titles
14:30 Jin’s digital onboarding in financial services
18:00 Why service design feels like internal consulting
24:35 Core competencies missing from design education
31:15 Navigating the "messy middle" of organizational change
39:00 Dealing with stakeholders who bake in solutions
45:30 The power of simplifying complex journey maps
52:00 Strategies for building internal resilience
58:45 Advice for aspiring in-house service designers
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