Beyond Feature Sets. Orchestrating service value through product leadership

The future isn’t a passive observer; it’s a canvas we actively paint through our actions in the present. By combining science fiction and foresight with service design, we can elevate futures thinking and service innovation to new heights.

When product management is weak, service design fills the void at the expense of its focus on design quality. When service design is in short supply, product people make design decisions by default. But if both professions pay attention to their complementary roles throughout the service lifecycle, they can form a winning partnership.

This article examines the rise of product over the past 15 years and argues that service design can and should act as a countercultural force in product-led organisations, rather than reconfiguring itself to match product’s cadence and structure.

Service design and product management are two disciplines that may seem distinct at first glance. However, upon closer examination, despite differences in methodologies and approaches, they share significant similarities in their objectives.

Service design and product management often operate from different mindsets, leading to unspoken gaps in strategy and execution. Drawing inspiration from the fields of architecture and engineering, a pattern language exposes these hidden tensions and proposes guiding principles to teams throughout the organisation. By defining these patterns, organisations can build an ‘experience DNA’ that drives the continuous evolution of their service delivery.

Research practices can cause disagreement between service designers and product managers. Although both disciplines share many tools, tension and mistrust persist due to their distinct mindsets, which result in different ways-of-working.

Public services affect the lives of nearly everyone, from getting a birth certificate to renewing a driver’s license to accessing retirement benefits. Despite their importance and ubiquity, however, public services can be exhausting to navigate. This is a challenge we tackle at the Public Policy Lab (PPL), a New York City-based nonprofit organisation that partners with US government agencies to improve public services. While our work applies service design to policymaking to improve users’ experiences, we also design the tools and products – from paper forms to digital platforms – that governments use to better deliver services to the public.

In the dynamic world of design consulting, we often find ourselves at the crossroads of two influential disciplines: Service Design and Product Management. Both fields share a fundamental goal, creating value for users and organizations, but they approach this challenge through distinct methodologies. Service Design, with its systemic perspective, ensures seamless end-to-end experiences, while Product Management hones in on delivering tangible, feature-rich solutions within structured roadmaps.

Product managers often define a 'product' as something that delivers value to the user. Similarly, service designers often describe a 'service' as something that provides value to the user. This framing works well when discussing products or services in isolation, but it introduces ambiguity when both co-exist in an organisation. This raises key questions:

Having led teams in both service design and product for over 15 years on the agency side, I am aware of my bias. I believe service design and product teams share more than their distinct labels suggest. To help challenge my views and gather practical advice, I invited five experienced service designers to contribute their insights.

Organisations’ growing attention to Customer Experience (CX) is mainly driven by the financial advantages it creates. Superior CX leads to higher levels of satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, yielding higher margins and reducing sales costs. The growing adoption of NPS (Net Promoter Score) as a key metric and strategic driver is a clear consequence of this trend. This renewed attention to CX has led to a wider adoption of service design in organisations. Yet, aspects of organisational realities may hamper service design’s customer-centric approach. In that context, product management’s pragmatic take might be timely and relevant.

Innovation thrives at the intersection of disciplines. Just as ecotones – the area where two ecosystems meet – foster unique species and incredible diversity, forming a diverse team is the top predictor of increased solution quality and implementation success.1 Collaboration between service designers and product managers can lead to novel solutions that balance customer needs and economic sustainability. However, misalignment often arises when designers focus on user experience, while product managers prioritise financial viability. Collaboration stalls, frustrations arise and users suffer with suboptimal solutions.

RideBuddy is a unique intrapreneurial initiative within Bosch, a multinational engineering and technology company based in Germany. Unlocking value and demonstrating service design impact wouldn’t have been possible without a well-developed collaboration strategy. In this article, we present our learnings on how collaboration was built from the ground-up and has been evolving while designing a Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) within a product organisation.

You start to work with a well-known large product company, excited to see how the magic behind the curtains happens. On your first day in the project, you get an invitation to a one-and-a-half hour ‘Product topic kick-off workshop’ video call. The meeting, originally planned for six people, now has 17 invitees and no agenda. Nonetheless, you’re eager to start the collaboration. After the meeting, you are still not sure what the product topic is about, who were the people that were talking most of the time and what the next steps are.

Service design and product management can and should collaborate seamlessly, but we all know that in complex organisations sometimes this can be hard to achieve. As a collective of in-house service design and product leaders, we’ve reflected on our experiences and documented our learnings from a recent global project. In this article we share our overall learning that effective teamwork and clear communication between the disciplines should be established from the start.