What an incredible discussion! The Service Design Network (SDN) Bay Area Chapter recently hosted an energizing virtual session with Grace Kwon, a Service Designer at Spotify and faculty member at SVA. While we couldn't record the session for NDA purposes, the insights shared were too good not to pass along.

If you missed it, here are some spicy takeaways on where Grace believes service design is heading and how to make a real impact for complex projects and within complex organizations.

Marketing, Product, Service Working Together

One of the most resonant points of the night was Grace’s breakdown of how users experience a brand:

Marketing gets them in.

Product keeps them in.

Service wins their trust.

In an industry often hyper-focused on immediate growth metrics, Grace reminded us that service design is the long game of building and maintaining that trust. It’s not just end users’ trust, it’s customers (in her case content creators) and stakeholders too! “Not about being beautiful but timely.” Timeliness and keeping promises were just a few examples on how to do this.

Systems Thinking is Service Design’s Superpower

When asked about the difference between Product/UX and Service Design, Grace highlighted the systemic "different brain" required for the latter. While product teams often focus on a single user or use case, service designers look at the entire ecosystem: the users, the operators supporting them, and the internal teams mirroring the user journeys and making them tick.

A key reminder: "Services are only as good as they are easy to maintain". If we build "sexy" tools or visuals (e.g., those pesky perfect blueprints) that internal teams can’t or won’t use, we haven’t actually solved the problem, if anything “we failed.”

Service Design is Just a Title

Grace was very clear that sadly the service design title sometimes gets in the way, keeping you out of the room. It’s not about your title, especially since many don’t understand what we do, it’s more about skillsets and what you can do to help your users and stakeholders meet their goals. Meet people where they are!

Impact isn't about using the title or using the "correct" design tool; it’s about communication. Grace shared that she often works in Google Slides rather than Figma/FigJam.

Data Literacy is Empathy: Speaking the language of metrics and profit/loss isn't just about business—it's an empathy exercise to understand what your stakeholders care about so you can make the right impact.

Have the Audacity to Lead

Perhaps the most empowering advice of the evening: "No one is pulling out a folding chair for you; you have to be brave." She, like many other service designers, is a practitioner of one on her team. Although she works in a larger Product Design team, and there are 2 other service designers at Spotify on other products, she mentioned feeling lonely. Service designers must have the audacity to step into product, marketing, or brand spaces to ensure the system works as a whole.

AI is Just a Tool

Don't fear the robots! Grace views AI not as a replacement, but as a partner for service designers’ discernment. AI can never take our jobs because it struggles with discernment (at least right now). AI can handle the technically savvy tasks, freeing up designers to ask the “spicy questions” that align us on the why in order to drive true innovation. We don’t need to be able to DO everything with AI that an engineer does, but exposure therapy is key to getting a better understanding of the context and constraints.

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A huge thank you to Grace Kwon for sharing her truths with us. I know I walked away feeling inspired to look deeper into the invisible layers of our services and to keep asking those “spicy questions!”

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