1. Define interviewees: Varied but specific. 

A company may employ thousands of people in various roles across different countries. It’s essential to understand the structure of the company and to be strategic in selecting who to involve in interviews. To develop a global strategy, you need to understand the problems faced by people in different roles. Aim for variety in your selection while being specific about the roles.


For example, working on a global strategy of a new data analytics department in a big energy company, we selected around 20-25 people that could cover the different data roles (such as managers, governance, user, etc), different levels of the hierarchy in the company, different business areas, different levels of importance (stakeholders that the client believed key to involve due their influence) and different locations where these people sit.

Steps to implement service design in strategy

2. Define questions: What to ask and whom to ask. 

People are generally busy and may not be willing to spend hours answering questions unless they see results. Therefore, it’s important to be smart about which questions to ask and whom to ask. Not everyone will have the same level of knowledge or interest, especially on specific topics like data. It can also be a good idea to sketch graphics or some kind of visuals to already get more concrete feedback on the strategy.

In a project for an oil and gas company in which I was involved in developing their digital strategy, many of the people in these interviews had very different expertise, such as VPs of an area to data scientists and drillers. This wide range often cause conversations to de-rail into the specifics of their work, rather than their relation to digitalmanipulation (or the lack of) of which we were interested on. This challenged us, and required from us to prepare more thoroughly, having to tailor questions and approaches to the different personas. It also helped us to create a graphic showing early high-level ideas of the possible strategy.

Patterns of pains and needs will often emerge, but working on a global scale requires organisation and clustering. Grouping specific areas for improvement helps identify opportunities for service. It’s crucial to involve the interviewees in defining key pains, needs, and opportunities to ensure no critical points are missed.

For example,in the project previously motioned about data analyticswe grouped pains, needs, and opportunities into broader themes such as business value, processes, people, and technology. Within these themes, we identified specific topics like data roles, governance, compliance, data quality, and data culture. This approach allowed us to clearly demonstrate the value of establishing this department to the rest of the organization and highlighted the potential services it could provide

This is where you define the services that the department or group can provide. These services should be tangible, specifying the main user, organisational involvement, and service providers. It may also reveal whether the initial hypothesis of resources needed is sufficient or not. Involving decision-makers at this stage is key.

Service blueprints are typically associated with customer journeys, but they can also be highly effective for illustrating the services offered within an organisation. For example, a blueprint might reveal that a data analytics department provides "guiding teams in adopting and implementing data policies" as a service. This service impacts specific roles (key users), requires involvement from various individuals across the organization or externally (key stakeholders), and involves departmental responsibilities as well as defined action and interaction points.

Moving from tangible to even more tangible outcomes, the final step is defining key objectives and results (OKRs) to achieve a successful service. For instance, if the department is to offer data literacy courses across the company by 2026, how will this be achieved? OKRs will evolve over time as unforeseen challenges and changes arise. This can also be applied more specifically to teams, value streams or even projects.

Lastly, there are a few considerations to keep in mind when working with service design for strategy. 

The most essential is to secure buy-in across the organisation. Co-creation and involvement from stakeholders and decision-makers ensure the strategy has organisational support. Engaging people across the company fosters a sense of ownership, increasing the possibility of buy-in. It’s also a good idea to dare to be visual and bold. Visualisations simplify complex ideas and tasks. Not everyone needs to understand everything – sometimes a simple image illustrating the department’s services or vision helps everyone understand the purpose at a glance. Moreover, designer-client collaboration is crucial. Internal knowledge is not just important—it’s essential. Active participation from the company enhances decision-making for interviews, topics, clustering, reporting, and discussions.

A few key considerations to make

As time progresses, we will gather more details, allowing us to refine OKRs and goals and reality will hit during the implementation of our services and products, inevitably leading to necessary redefinitions and adjustments. With this initial strategy we can be sure we have set a strong guidance, a cornerstone to set a department or project on, a kind of map we can lean on.

A guide to using service design for a department strategy