Rethinking Product Leadership: How Service Design Can Create a Seamless Organizational Experience

As product guys, we're often caught up in the details—launching products, optimizing features, prioritizing backlogs. But what if the real magic of product leadership lies in how all these moving parts come together to create an experience? A service design approach can help us see the bigger picture: our organization as an ecosystem of interconnected services.

Service design isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a way to break down organizational silos and create experiences that make sense—not just for customers, but for the business, internal teams, and stakeholders. Here’s how we can bring this approach to life in a practical, product-driven world.

1. Look Beyond the Product: The Service is the Whole Experience

Product managers often fall into the trap of thinking their job is done once they ship a feature. But I’ve learned that the feature is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. A feature might solve one problem, but if it doesn't fit into the overall service, it can create new friction points elsewhere.

Real-World Example:

Think of a payment platform—maybe you’ve rolled out a new payment method option for merchants/cardholders. But if the customer service, onboarding, or reconciliation process isn’t in sync, the value of that feature crumbles. At Our Company, we faced a similar issue when launching a multi-credit provider integration for merchants. By stepping back and using a service design mindset, we realized that it wasn’t just about giving merchants more payment options, but about how they could navigate and manage those options seamlessly. The entire flow—from selecting providers to processing transactions—had to feel like one cohesive experience.

2. Map the Journey: Not Just for Customers, but for Teams

Customer journey mapping is a classic tool, but we often forget to apply it internally. Imagine your organization as one big machine: every department is a cog, and every product release, team interaction, and customer touchpoint is a gear in the system. If one cog grinds, the whole machine slows down.

Service design encourages us to map not just the customer’s journey, but the internal flows that make that journey possible. Product development doesn't exist in a vacuum. It involves marketing, sales, operations, and even legal teams. When these teams aren’t aligned, bottlenecks occur.

3. Break the Silo: Cross-Functional Collaboration is Non-Negotiable

One of the most immediate benefits of a service design approach is breaking down silos between teams. Product development, design, engineering, marketing—each plays a role in delivering the overall service. It’s easy to forget that these teams don’t just need to cooperate; they need to be in sync in real time.

But it goes beyond collaboration. Service design encourages a shared language across teams. When everyone understands the bigger service vision, they start making decisions that support the entire ecosystem, not just their own piece of it.

Real-World Example:

In a past project integrating a automated pricing system into an e-commerce platform, we initially treated it like any other feature: the product team designed it, engineering built it, and marketing promoted it. But the first iteration was disjointed, and users complained that the rewards system felt clunky. After bringing in the entire cross-functional team early in the process, we co-created a smoother loyalty experience. The marketing team ensured the messaging aligned with the feature’s flow, while the engineering team optimized the backend to reduce lags in rewards updates. Collaboration across departments created an integrated experience for users.

Create a Feedback Loop: Continuously Align User, Business, and Internal Needs

In a service design approach, feedback is constant and comes from multiple layers—users, stakeholders, and internal teams. As a Product Lead, I’ve learned that you can’t afford to just collect feedback after a feature has launched. You need feedback during ideation, development, and deployment.

Service design creates a structured loop where feedback is integrated from all corners of the business and beyond. This loop doesn’t just fine-tune the product, it helps align organizational priorities with real-time customer needs, which is crucial for staying agile in a competitive market.

Real-World Example:

When working on an AI-powered recipe recommendation engine for a social network app for food lovers, we were excited about the product's potential. But early testing and feedback revealed that the recommendations were too niche, and users wanted more general options. We pivoted quickly, and with regular input from user feedback loops, customer support, and sales insights, we optimized the feature to deliver what users really wanted: flexibility and personalization. The lesson? The product we imagined wasn’t the product users needed until the feedback loop was in full swing.

Service design isn’t about adding another layer of complexity; it’s about simplifying the entire experience—for your users, your team, and your organization.

5. Think of Stakeholders as Co-Creators, Not Just Investors

Stakeholders are often viewed as distant overseers, but in a service design approach, they are an integral part of the creation process. Their needs, goals, and expectations should be aligned with the service you’re delivering. Bringing stakeholders in as co-creators not only improves communication but ensures that the service evolves to meet both user and business needs.

Real-World Example:

During the development a payment facilitation service for merchants, we were integrating multiple credit providers. Initially, we had focused on the merchants as our primary user base. But after bringing key stakeholders from credit providers into the design process, we realized we needed to adjust the service flow to better meet their compliance and reporting needs. Involving them as co-creators made the final product much stronger.

Conclusion: Service Design is a Mindset Shift

As product leaders, we need to stop viewing our work as a collection of disconnected products and features. Service design forces us to zoom out, look at the organization as a cohesive service, and integrate everything from product development to customer interactions into a unified experience. The result? More satisfied users, smoother operations, and stronger alignment between business objectives and user needs.

Service design isn’t about adding another layer of complexity; it’s about simplifying the entire experience—for your users, your team, and your organization.

At the end...

By bringing this mindset into your daily product management practice, you’ll see a transformation in not just how you deliver products, but in how your entire organization operates, aligning every team towards creating value together.