CASE STUDY
Service design for alignment in innovation
In an organisation filled with incredibly talented and committed people, the customer experience was being hampered by teams working in siloes, each one building and innovating new features and processes with no access to the bigger picture.
It's not uncommon for this to happen in organisations: everyone has their heads down, working hard to bring what they believe are the right innovations to life. But how can anyone know if they are the right innovations without understanding how they fit into the end-to-end experience? And perhaps more importantly, how does each team know what other teams are working on, so that they can all be aligned?
Skills
People leadership | Building trust & collaboration | Service Design
Bringing people together
The primary objective of this effort was to bring the various teams together to share knowledge and understand the role they played in the experience they were creating. To best solve the challenges the organisation was facing, I needed to create an environment where people felt comfortable sharing experiences and ideas, through which they could organically appreciate the organisation inefficiencies brought about by a siloed approach.
As a way of tackling this challenge, I went old-school! The business already had a journey mapped out that showed the product flow, including the emails that were being sent out to customers as they progressed through the journey. Whilst it was about a year out of date, I knew this would be a good starting point for the exercise, so I had it printed out in large scale - 5 metres long, to be precise! I booked a room with a huge table and got everyone gathered around it. Standing together and being able to see the whole journey in front of them like that seemed to instantly engage people. Sometimes, nothing beats being able to interact with things on paper - I find that having a physical copy makes things more tangible.
Multiple areas of the organisation were represented - Product, Sales, Account Managers, Marketing, CX and UX. At the start of the session, I focused on creating a relaxed and inclusive environment, informally introducing the principles of service design and explaining the value the approach could bring. Establishing trust and buy-in at this stage was important, particularly as most of the participants were unfamiliar with workshop-based collaboration.
The workshop was structured to gradually build buy-in:
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Map out the current journey - the organisation already had their mapping of the product journey, albeit out of date, but I needed to start slowly to enable the participants to feel comfortable.
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Map out existing innovations - this was intended to highlight to people how siloed their current approach was, and how each innovation was, unknowingly, impacting other aspects of the business.
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Identify opportunities for improvements both to the customer experience but also to internal operations, and in doing so, help everyone understand how opportunities lay not within specific teams but required cross-team collaboration in order for them to be as impactful to their customers' experience as they wanted to be.
The in-person workshop brought together people from across the business
The workshop started well, with people cautious but interested. In order to take the level of collaboration established during the exercise to map out the existing journey, participants were then split into mixed groups for the next phase. I intentionally combined people from different departments. Each group explored the mapped journey to identify pain points, operational challenges and opportunities for improvement. One notable outcome of the session was how quickly participants embraced the collaborative format once this aspect of the workshop got going. Many commented on how valuable it was to work directly with colleagues from other areas of the organisation, something that rarely happened in their day-to-day roles.
The energy and engagement in the room grew as the workshop progressed. Participants who had initially been uncertain about the format became increasingly confident in contributing ideas and insights. The experience not only surfaced valuable observations about the customer journey but also highlighted the operational inefficiencies created by siloed ways of working. By the end of the session, there was a strong sense of shared ownership of the service and enthusiasm for continuing this more collaborative way of solving problems.
Getting hands-on with the journey!
Key deliverables
Service Blueprint
To bring clarity to both the customer and operational experience, I led the creation of a comprehensive service blueprint. This allowed us to map front-stage and back-stage interactions side by side, connecting what customers would experience with the processes, systems and teams supporting them.
Built collaboratively over several weeks, the blueprint surfaced siloed knowledge, exposed assumptions and provided, for the first time, a shared reference point for decision-making. Crucially, it was something the entire group had contributed to.
The resulting service blueprint incorporating screenshots of the product and the emails that customers receive. Opportunities the team identified are the yellow post-its towards the bottom.
Structured Journey Framework
Looking at onboarding through a service design lens enabled two critical shifts:
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Visibility of gaps. We identified key moments in the journey that hadn’t been designed at all — both from a customer and operational perspective.
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Purpose-driven delivery. Every asset, form, and communication could now be tied back to a clear moment in the journey. This gave context to collateral and prevented further piecemeal development.
From the blueprint, I created a simple but effective action-tracking output that linked outstanding tasks directly to specific points in the journey. This gave teams clarity on what needed to be built, why it mattered and how it contributed to the whole service.
With a shared framework in place, the project regained structure and direction — and we were able to move forward with greater confidence and cohesion.
Impact
Taking such a collaborative approach achieved several key outcomes:
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It brought the wider team together. The workshop created a rare opportunity for colleagues from across the organisation to work together in a structured and collaborative environment. This cross-functional interaction helped participants better understand each other’s roles, challenges and priorities. As the session progressed, people became more comfortable collaborating and began building connections that extended beyond the workshop itself. The exercise demonstrated the value of collective problem-solving and helped break down some of the barriers created by siloed ways of working
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Identified large-scale cross-functional opportunities. By shifting the conversation from individual projects to the end-to-end experience, participants were able to identify opportunities to better align their work. This broader perspective helped the organisation begin thinking about improvements in terms of the overall service rather than isolated touchpoints
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It established a new way of working for the business. For many participants, the workshop introduced them to service design methods and collaborative journey mapping for the first time. Initially, some attendees were unsure about the format, because structured workshops and participatory exercises were not part of their usual working practices. But participants quickly engaged with the process and embraced the opportunity to contribute ideas. The positive response demonstrated how effective collaborative design techniques can be in unlocking insight from across an organisation. It also helped build confidence in workshop-based approaches, opening the door for similar sessions to be used in the future.
List of opportunities organised by journey phase and theme