Mastering The Most Important Tool in Your Design Toolkit / Inside Service Design / Kara & Sidd / Ep. #10

Mar 5, 2026

Siddhartha Saxena, an architect-turned-healthcare service designer working on telemedicine and org nervous systems. Kara Snyder, a former accountant and coach now shaping culture and claims in financial services. They explore resilience as capacity not output. They discuss creating a liminal space between self and work, rituals to protect capacity, and ways to sustain meaningful, people-centered service design.

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ANECDOTE

From Accounting Night Shifts To Service Design

Kara moved from accounting and PwC into startups and later coaching before discovering service design via General Assembly.
She survived 80-hour weeks and multiple personal losses which triggered her pivot to humane work and coaching frazzled professionals.

ANECDOTE

Architect To In-House Service Designer

Sidd started in architecture, then joined a YC startup where he learned business thinking and later found service design through articles and a course.
He now works at Amura Health focused on telemedicine and balancing rapid growth with organizational 'nervous system' design.

INSIGHT

Service Design Feels Like The Wild West

Service design in-house often feels like the 'wild west' where requests vary wildly and remit is ambiguous.
Kara shifted to culture work (claims team) using Emotional Culture Deck workshops while tech changes were handled elsewhere.

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Let's be real for a moment...

In the corporate context, what's the thing that usually gets rewarded the most?

It’s often the person who "just" grinds through the chaos, works overtime to fix a broken process, and absorbs all the organizational friction without complaining.

From very early on in our careers we are taught to treat ourselves like machines that just need to carry more weight.

But as Kara Snyder points out in our conversation, that is treating resilience as output. It’s performing professionalism when you are completely depleted. And it is a fast track to burnout.

Instead, Kara challenges us to think about resilience as capacity.

What do you actually need to sustain yourself so you can stay in this deeply human and emotionally demanding work?

Because at the end of the day, the most important tool in your service design toolkit isn't a journey map or a blueprint... well, it's you.

In this episode of Inside Service Design, I sit down with Kara and Siddhartha Saxena to talk about the inner game of being an in-house service design professional.

We step away from the frameworks and talk about how to actually survive and thrive in this beautifully complex role.

This conversation touches on topics like:

How to stop measuring your worth by how much stress you can carry.
How to create a "liminal space" between you and your work.
And how to get to Friday and actually feel a sense of accomplishment, even when the work is messy.

So if you’ve been feeling the weight of driving positive change using service design, take a deep breath, slow down, and tune into this one.

How do you protect your own capacity? Have you found any specific rituals particularly helpful?

Let me know, I’d love to hear how you're dealing with this.

Be well,

~ Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to the January 2026 Round Up!

03:30 Kara’s Journey: From Accounting to PWC

06:30 Facing Burnout and Personal Loss

09:00 Sidd’s Journey: From Architecture to Startups

11:30 Discovering Service Design as a Business Bridge

12:30 Remote Healthcare in India

14:00 Designing the "Nervous System" of an Organization

15:45 Navigating Complexity

19:00 Why Service Design Feels Like the "Wild West"

19:50 Tool Spotlight: Using the Emotional Culture Deck

21:30 Moving from Doing to Being

24:00 Resilience in Startups vs. Corporate Safety

26:15 How Personal Grief Shapes Professional Perspective

31:15 The Gap Between Self and Work

34:30 Why Service Designers are Natural "Absorbers"

38:30 Building a Protective Layer Against Burnout

41:15 Mapping the Invisible Organizational Nervous System

44:45 Managing Design at Scale

48:15 When to Say "No" to the Machine

52:30 The Power of Invisible Labor

56:15 Measuring the Value of What Can't Be Seen

59:00 Protecting Your Design Culture from Company Culture

1:00:15 Final Takeaways

--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---

--- [ 3. CIRCLE ] ---

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