Automated transcript 

## Introduction to Lily Graf

it's really my pleasure to introduce you to Lily, our speaker of tonight. Lily Graf is the founder of IMMA Collective and an impact driven Service Design consultant.

As the founder of IMMA Collective, Lily supports freelancers and independent professionals in growing sustainable life supporting practice, not just profitable ventures. Alongside that, she consults with impact driven organizations to strengthen their adaptive capacities in times of compounding change, offering strategic design facilitation and resilience building expertise.

Her work spans topics like climate adaptation. Personal and financial resilience. 

## Lily's Career Journey

Prior to founding, IMMA Lilly worked in Service Design roles as Tax Fix, Project by if, Livework studio, and Experentia. Before her transition to Service Design, Lilly worked on project and innovation management roles.

Lilly has resume that is very full. But there is one thing that I'd like to mention too, which is that Lilly also taught design research at SUPSI University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland and has served as a visiting professor at Polytechnico di Milano. So it's really my pleasure to welcome on the stage this wonderful expert and lovely human who is Lily.

Welcome on the stage. Lily. Hi Daniele. 

Thank you for having me. 

It's such a pleasure to have you here. As this is a Lightning Talk event, I will leave the stage directly to you. 

Yeah. Thank 

you. 

## Key Lessons in Service Design

So to everybody who was listening know, you heard a list of things that I was doing, but if I would boil it down in my career you can apply Service Design essentially to two things.

Either creating new things from scratch or improving existing things. And as service designers, we often do this by also changing the way of how organizations work. And in my career as a service designer in different agencies, I really loved working on designing things from scratch and creating something new when it has never existed before, has some particular obstacles and things that happen.

And so I thought I share three lessons that I learned across those 10 years of designing new value propositions and offerings for government, big organizations. Organizations, startups, but also like now solopreneurs. So people who just run one single, like a one person business. And one of the things that has been like a hard lesson for me to learn when we learn Service Design at university or anybody else.

I think many of you are familiar with the double MA Diamond as a process. So if you're not familiar, essentially the double diamond no has two faces in the design process. First, it's about figuring out what is the right thing to design and then designing the thing right? And so what I learned along the way is ideally you have the time to go through the entire process.

And often when you work in bigger organizations or organizations that are already familiar with design, they know what it is. It's, you can go through it, it's relatively easy. But when I moved from London to Italy. Also into the startup world. And I find myself working in organizations that were like, what Service Design?

What are, what is that you do? I want to design a new service offering a new value proposition, a new venture? Can you help me do that? One of the things that I discovered and learned and how to apply is really mixing and combining the di double diamond in one thing. And what do very concretely by that?

Whenever you come into organizations. They really have a hard time knowing or understanding that they know they wanna focus on the problem. Usually decision makers already have a solution in mind. It's our, we just love know, having an idea and one thing to test or build the idea. And often decision makers think that if we build it, people will come and buy it.

But that's not the case, as you might know. 

## Combining Research and Testing

And so one of the elements that I learned how to do is when we do user research, really combining and explor territory research, discovery research with testing of early concepts and prototypes of ideas that your decision ma makers might have the stakeholders.

For example, when I was asked to, for a big FinTech company to design a new value proposition around financial wellbeing, yes. We asked the first half an hour of the interview or 40 minutes about anything around financial wellbeing, what finances meet with, how they manage money, what are their struggles.

And then in the last 20 minutes we showed some early concepts. In different direction to get a sense of what people liked or disliked. And this had the benefit of one for us, getting really the deep insights that you need to create something truly valuable and to go into the kind of no un unmet needs territory.

And at the same time, it also was giving the satisfaction to decision makers to test their ideas and see what worked and what flopped. And this was a really. Clever way and that I still bring along. So not doing first like a whole review and round exploratory research and then testing, but actually combining the two things in one.

And I still do this to this day, even with my, I. Solopreneurs that I help, in this case, it's often like a one page idea of an offering. And so first asking people what are their problems and then figuring out is this solution potentially viable or does it make sense? And so this might be one concrete tip that you can take away and I want to share and also write any questions that you have or curiosities around this in the chat because we're happy to answer them.

The second tip is really once you have those conversation, and this is specific when you design new things from scratch, because when you have an existing service that you try to improve. You already have a business model that works. It's a service that brings in money. It exists because it is viable, but when you design something from scratch, you don't know if it's actually viable, if it brings in enough revenue income that it justifies building it.

And and when we design new services from scratch, it really is combining Service Design and business design. And so having those skills is essential. 

## Focusing on Painkiller Problems

And when it comes specifically to figuring out what is what you should solve or what it is that you should design, I like to introduce you to the concept of painkiller problems and vitamin problems.

Why, and what do I mean by that? One tendency that we have as service designers is that we are incredibly curious. We often have a very holistic perspective about the service end to end, the front end and the backend. And we really like to look at all the details that would make a great experience or that would work well.

But when it comes to designing a first value proposition, we really need to focus on something that. Would work really well and that is a painkiller problem. And a painkiller problem is something like headache, something that really is painful for the customer right here and right now. And that they would give them a sense of urgency to leave the home right now and find the next pharmacy to get something or to lie down or take a break.

Or go for a walk so they have the urgency to take action. Vitamin problems are. On the other hand, a little bit like, yes, you have a vitamin deficiency, but you might not notice any kind of relevant symptoms right away. On the long run it can be detrimental, but here in the here and ra no, you don't notice this so much.

And so what happens is that your customers don't have an urgency to take action. They could start taking vitamins today, they could stay start taking vitamins tomorrow and so on. And so this is a thing that whenever we do research within as a service designers, we really need to look out for the painkiller problems because if we don't do that, it often doesn't.

Work really well, or it doesn't lead to the viability of people actually taking action and buying. I, my myself, made this mistake sometimes when I initially bought built IMMA collective. Why? Because when I spoke with freelancers, so people who work for themselves, they often their number one problem is finding clients.

And so I know that's the painkiller problem that people have. That is the problem that I should solve. But as a service designer, what I observed is also that when people don't know who is their client and what is their offer, they really go in many different directions. And so it takes a lot of effort.

So I thought, okay, let me help them design their offering and their value proposition. But until I have not combined it. To let's design your offering to enable you to get clients by design, not by chance. And combine that it wasn't really working. So even if you understand that maybe people need something else, then it's like that they not explain right away, but you need to link it potentially to the painkiller problem.

And this is even, so I want to give you another concrete example of why this is so relevant of identifying one specific painkiller problem and then also thinking about delivery. If you think of Amazon as an example, Amazon didn't start it as a one stop shop offering everything and solving all the things.

It's, it started just with books. It delivered simple books because they could actually be fit through. No. Essentially your post postbox at home and could be delivered very easily. So again, that's why it is so important to figure out what is the one painkiller problem that you can solve with your service, and that's your focus for designing a new value proposition.

I. So those are the first two lessons. One around combining exploratory research with early testing. The second, really focusing on painkiller problems and identifying the biggest painkiller problems that you wanna solve. And ignoring vitamin problems at the beginning because you need to make the thing viable and then you can add things later on.

## Business Design and Service Design

And the third lesson that I learned along this way is really specifically around learning business design and combining business design or business language with Service Design. Why? Because whenever I designed value propositions or these new offerings or ventures, I usually was interacting with C-level within the organization or however, like the CEO or management.

And to make your work stand out and more effective, you really need to translate what, how we speak as service designers into business language. And so when it, when we usually say, ah, we need to make something desirable usually you need to relate that and connect that to actually this will drive adoption.

And the more you make it desirable or the more you actually also create an experience that people wanna talk about and no refer other people to. The more, this probably drives retention and the more this reduces cost of acquisition. So cac, so really think what is the business metrics that your organization are having, what are the KPIs?

And then linking the work that you do as a service designer to those metrics to justify certain decisions and to give you more confidence in the work that you're presenting and why it is relevant. To have to have design in there. And I think this also then we often, as designers say we'd love to have a seat at the table but it's our responsibility to really learn how to communicate this.

In a way that speaks to to the decision makers. I'll give you another example because often I think we we feel a bit like specifically when it comes to design decision or direction in which we should go. I was in, in one situation where we had two different directions and value propositions, but one I thought that's not.

As ethical as I thought in terms of, and you might have been in situations that were similar oh, maybe this is not the best decision that you could make for a user that might not be ethical. Yes, it might be a great business decision, but not in the long run. And what I learned is actually saying it's not about saying, ah, this is, may, might not be that ethical or not, because that puts them in a hard spot.

What I often was saying this direction would present you with some reputational risk. Here it is. What could be the impact in terms of reputation for your company? And that usually really works much better than saying ethical risks. So sometimes I think the concept is the same, but the language that we use is completely different.

And so learning how to adapt that language so that we have more influence and that we can basically translate our concepts in business speak and therefore gain a seat at the table. So those are the three kind of main lessons that I took away along my career and also skills that I wanted to acquire.

But I'm curious to now hear your questions or your curiosities around what you would like to know more or learn more from. 

## Q&A Session

Hey, thank you so much, Lily. I really appreciate. These three extremely valuable insights, and especially I love the framing of the second one with the painkiller versus vitamins.

I feel it's a very clear IMMAge there that you're sharing with us. So obviously people will slowly start to write questions in the chat, and I'm very happy to share Alway already. The first question coming from someone who was nearly your name Lely who say, says, thank you, Lily. We surely use different tools in Service Design projects.

If your Service Design toolkits were a backpack, what's one unexpected item you'd always carry? Oh, that's a very poet question. Love it. 

The very beautiful question. I think I would always have a pen and paper there because I believe that often it is really putting down any idea or visualization. On paper.

It can be super scrappy, but maybe like I just look at this. I have it on my desk. Usually my morning coffee is really writing down or making visuals. Of a new ideas when I think, and as a service designer, specifically, when we collaborate and deal with other people being able put to put down on paper, a simple visual makes the idea concrete.

It is a first version of a PO Prototype, and it avoids any misunderstandings because then you can hand over the pen to the other person and say. How, this is how I see it. How do you see, how you would you change it? So visualizing and creating prototypes that could be easy. Sketches is an incredibly powerful tool.

So yeah, pen and paper for me, I. I'm 

curious to hear about this. That's a very important tool. Thank you so much. And I'm sure other people have other suggestions, so don't hesitate to add your suggestions in the chat of what you would add in your metaphorical backpack. We have another question coming from Emmanuel Fran, who says, I love your talk, li Lily in a more, in a, in an always more digitized world.

Through platforms, how can we not lose contact with our clients? Do you have any advices on how maybe you manage that? 

Yeah, so I think I really love the approach of continuous discovery by Theresa Torres of like, how do you design something that allows you to constantly be in contact with your customer every week?

So for example, in my case, within a collective, I probably have I. Specific discovery calls intentionally. Like I spend 45 minutes with people to figure out if I could help them every week. And by having those conversations, asking them questions about where they would they like to go? How would their dream business look like in a year from now?

What is holding them back? What are discoveries? I essentially do discovery calls every week, and then I use the insights and reflections that I get from them. To one, create content. So that's really helpful because then sometimes people say like how it feels like reading your newsletter, you're in my head because I really hear the language and it allows me to speak constantly.

I know that depending on if you like, this is me being because I really. Learn that sales is actually doing Service Design. The two things are really close together. If you are in a, in an organization that is, has no, where decision makers are much more further apart from people who are take are the clients, then what are, again, some rituals that you can bring in or even what are sometimes for us when we did those discovery calls.

Tiny video snippets. It doesn't need to be long that we would record at the end with the key question from the customers to bring back those voices of the customer and make them super concrete. So I believe I'm a huge believer of the more I learn actually how to build like no businesses, I really can see a combination between Service, Design, marketing, and sales.

The two, three things really go hand in hand and you can combine them so much more. Than we actually think. I have more ideas on that, but I'm no one thing also to create space for like other questions. But if there is one thing that I can share, I actually have designed a couple of quizzes and I do designed those quizzes for Emma Collective, but I also have designed them for some of the clients, which is essentially a quiz that then gives you a result. And for me, those quizzes are also a great way to learn about your customer, to know, combine marketing and again, data collection. So to bring those together. And I think we service designer have not really spent so much time understanding how we could better combine exactly Service, Design, marketing, and sales.

Hey, thank you so much. We have a very practical question as you shared a bit of your morning routine through visualizations and so yeah. And that it is an a session part of your toolkit. Juliana asks, have you tips for people like me who struggle to do sketches effectively? Any exercises you will advise.

Thank you so much for your insights. 

Juliana, I think this is a wonderful question because you're asking me to me I actually found my school kind of know, I don't know how you call them, but the evaluations from the fourth grade, and my teacher was saying like, you have a very you are not really good at.

Drawing and writing, it's really ugly. Until this day. My writing is not the beautiful thing. I think we often see a lot of people in Service Design who sketch beautifully and write beautifully. I'm not that person and that's totally fine, and I think for a long time, and I have a hot. Lots of book here, how to draw everything, how to make sketches.

And I spent a lot of time doing it. But what I understood is actually no, it's much more about the idea and the concept and as you, the explanation, it's not how it looks at all. It can be totally messy as long as you, you find ways. For me, what has been probably one of the more powerful ways is not about how I draw, but.

Really tapping into the power of analogies and metaphors. I use a lot of them. Like the thing that I used with you today, the painkillers versus vitamin problem because they stay with you. If you're able to use metaphors and analogies, then people will remember what you said. If you sketch beautifully, they might record, remember the sketch.

But in the end it's still no, like just the circles and squares. That's it. And you don't need much more. 

I always like to remember to, to remind people that, some of the most well-known paintings are the ca paintings that we see from cavemen, and they're shit, they're truly shit. But, these paintings, tell so much of a story of what happened back in those days, and they are so valuable for historians and so many people, so that it's not so much about how they drew, it's what they drew and drawing.

The analogies maybe is then even more telling, even if it's just boxes and and small lines. It makes a lot of a difference. Yes. We have a next question Lily again we have a few questions of people who are very deep in the question sharing. That's really good. That was a really insightful talk.

Thank you so much. I'm curious, Lily, what's a non-design thing you do regularly that secretly makes you a better designer? Yes. 

Is essentially what I learned is you really become an incredibly good designer if you teach what you learn. So I actually spend a lot of time either than teaching at university because I had the chance, but sometimes even just creating small, short videos of new concepts.

And I think when I started at the beginning, I think it is more like. You don't come up with new frameworks and concept. I really admire the people within the agency that were work, that came up with new models and things and was like, I don't know how to do that. But it's at the beginning it's just like you learn something and then you find a way of how to explain it in a super simple way to others.

You just basically repeat the knowledge, you credit the person you get the information from and you play it back. And once you do this more and more, you will start seeing that suddenly you start up actually combining things and you start making new models and frameworks. So now I come actually up with models and frameworks, but it took me a few years to essentially.

Go through the process of doing something, learning something, and then teaching it, or you simply do something and then you are right about it. I think I recently helped my brother go from an idea that he had to testing this business ideas in three days and we just simply did it. But what I then did is essentially writing it down.

So you make everything that you did explicit, and that's what actually teaching is about. You need to simplify it. You need to make that. Implicit and passive knowledge explicit, and that actually then makes you a better designer. 

Thank you so much. We are already at the three questions, but we still have some tiny time, so let's try to do another one.

Juliana comes back with another question, which is, have you ever encountered resistance from business stakeholders when proposing Service Design interventions? How do you deal with that? 

Yes, of course, and specifically I think where I would say. The biggest resistance was when I moved from London, where Service Design is well known to Verona, Italy, where nobody knows Service Design.

And I think the biggest tip for me, first there was essentially not talking about Service Design. If people don't know it and don't understand the value, I. I just simply help people test new ideas and make sure that they de-risk them. So I would when entrepreneurs or innovation managers came to me, they said ah, we would like to build this new service.

We would like to build this new idea. And was like saying. Okay, what, let's do this instead of building it and then it might flop, not flop, and you have spent thousands of euros or Swiss francs into making something happen that then doesn't give you any return of investment. Let's figure out how to design small prototypes to de-risk this experiment and test it out.

And I simply really talk about what is the outcome that I like to help them achieve. So I help them to de-risk some things. I help them to make sure that they are not wasting time and money in something that doesn't work. I help them that the innovation manager who has me doesn't lose face and is no, is.

Is blamed for investing and building something that the ends up not working out. And sometimes it's if we figure out in two, three months that it's not worth investing, then that's actually a big su success. And so I think for me, the resistance that I could in that, it depends always of course, which resistance, but for me, the resistance has been, I don't know about Service Design and why does this matter.

And so for me. Here, how do you overcome? This is really talking about what is the desired outcome? I always think about, it's about selling the holiday, not the trip. How does it feel to be on the beach? Making sure that you have tested an idea before you have spend a lot of money that you know that this works rather than these are the three steps, and this is the process and this is the methodology.

Nobody cares around. How you get there, the importance is that you get. And I can be lying on the beach happily, no. Sipping a cocktail. 

You are really the master of analogies. Sell the holiday, not the trip. That's one that will stake in the books. Hey, thank you so much Lily, for all what you shared with us.

We are slowly coming to a close and obviously there is a lot of thank you messages for you. Just gonna show you one or two of them as we arrive to the end. It's been a really inspiring moment. Thank you so much for sharing all of. What you shared with us. 

## Closing Remarks and Resources

I have a last notes that I'd like to share, which is if you are someone who is interested in exploring solo entrepreneurship and you might not know yet, if.

This is something for you. Lily has a wonderful quiz on her website, EMA Collective, that you can try out to see if you are ready or not. And if you're ready, obviously she has plenty of resources, a community around that. But also if you're not ready. It's also a good sign that's maybe there is a few other things that you can learn that where you can prepare yourself.

So check her website. I think it's definitely a very powerful resources for people interested in maybe going in the freelance route. Launching an one person business or, just being interested also in business in general. But for me on my side, a big thank you Lily for all your insights.

I thank you to all the people who shared their questions in the chat and who were present. It was really a lovely moment that we were able to share together. And thank you so much for being here today. 

Thank you for having me, and thank you for everybody for taking the time to listen in and tune in, 

especially on a Saturday.

Yes. Thank you so much everybody. Have a lovely time. Cheers. Bye.