Service Design Has Two Jobs. Most Teams Only Do One.

December 15, 2025
Frank Spillers
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Summary: Tactical service design improves experiences within existing constraints, while strategic service design changes the systems that create those experiences. Most organisations expect transformation but only fund or demand tactical work, which leads to repeated fixes and rising complexity. Service design delivers real impact when both are clearly distinguished and intentionally connected.

The Difference Between Improving Services and Changing Them

Most organisations say they want transformation. Yet most service design work remains tactical. That mismatch explains much of the frustration in achieving a return on investment (ROI) from Service Design.

Service design is sometimes blamed for being too broad, too slow, or unclear in value. In reality, the discipline is usually doing exactly what it is asked to do: incrementally improve services. The disconnect is that tactical service design is being asked to deliver strategic outcomes. That does not work.

Strategic and tactical service design are related, but they serve different purposes. Conflating them limits impact, exhausts teams, and leaves systems unchanged. If you want service design to matter, this distinction is not academic. It is operational.

Why This Matters Now

Service complexity is increasing. Budgets are tightening. Meanwhile, user tolerance is shrinking. For example:

52% of consumers expect a brand to respond to inquiries within one hour, suggesting much tighter patience windows for customer service than in the past (Emplifi 2022)

86% of consumers will leave a brand they trusted after only two poor customer experiences (Emplifi 2022)

73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after multiple poor experiences, and many will abandon a brand after just one bad interaction. Source: Zendesk (2023)

In this environment, experience problems are system problems.

Like tactical UX design, tactical service design alone increases cost over time. Strategic service design reduces demand by addressing root causes.

Organisations that understand this distinction invest differently. They protect tactical work while creating space for strategic intervention. They stop expecting designers to transform systems from the edges.

The reality is that many organisations hire Service Designers explicitly to play a tactical role. This expectation is baked into hiring and delivery models. I have heard this directly in several central UK government organisations (federal, for North American readers) where I have led service design work: “I need you to work tactically, unfortunately,” said a Service Design Director, and “I need you to work in a silo for now,” said a non-design Deputy Director.

👉 Want to learn how to do both tactical and strategic service design? Join me in January 2026 for my latest Service Design Intensive

Why the love of Tactical Service Design?

Tactical service design focuses on delivery within a defined scope. It responds to visible problems. A journey breaks down. Complaints rise. Staff create workarounds. Leaders ask for improvement. It makes sense, in the same way outputs are intuitive over outcomes. Yes, but if you’re paying attention, outcomes are as critical as outputs for managing teams.

Tactical Service Design typically includes journey mapping, service blueprints for a single service, pain-point analysis, prototyping, and usability testing. The goal is to reduce friction and improve experiences in the short term.

Don’t get me wrong: this work is essential. It helps people today. It supports delivery teams. It creates momentum and trust. Many services would be unusable without it.

However, tactical service design works inside existing constraints. It assumes policies, funding models, ownership structures, and success measures are fixed. It rarely questions why those constraints exist or who benefits from them. It steers clear of policy design, it steers clear of a joined-up view that requires cross-org stakeholder engagement.

That is not a failure. It is the nature of tactical work.

Problems arise when tactical service design is treated as the appropriate level of intervention. Organisationally, it’s a problem of the level of zoom. Keep service designers looking at their shoes, and they miss the sky. In truth, they need to do both.

When Tactical Work Becomes the Default

Organisations lean on tactical service design because it feels manageable. It fits delivery cycles. It produces visible outputs. It does not challenge power structures or decision rights.

Tactical work also aligns well with project funding and sprint-based delivery. Leaders can see progress. Teams can ship improvements. Everyone feels productive.

The downside is subtle. When tactical work dominates, the same problems reappear in new forms. Teams solve problems at a granular or feature level, with limited system-wide impact. But demand remains high. Staff effort increases. All while complexity expands.

Designers sense this pattern early. But they can get caught in fixing symptoms while the causes remain untouched. Over time, morale drops. Credibility erodes. Senior leaders see service design as adjustments to tone rather than as transformational business change.

Strategic Service Design Changes the Conditions

Strategic service design operates at a different level. It focuses on why services behave the way they do, not just how they feel.

It asks questions that cut across silos. Why does failure demand keep rising? Who owns outcomes end-to-end? What incentives drive current behaviour? Which capabilities are missing? Where do policies conflict with user needs?

The work involves service portfolios, operating models, capability maps, governance design, and long-term service visions. It is slower. It is messier. It requires leadership involvement.

Doing strategic service design, we reshape constraints rather than accepting them. It changes how services are funded, governed, and measured. This is where durable change happens.

Importantly, strategic service design is not abstract thinking. It is applied systems work. The outputs influence real decisions about ownership, structure, and investment.

Full Stack Service Design Connects the Layers

Full-stack service design provides a way out of this trap. It links experience-level work to operational, organisational, and policy layers. Erika Flowers recently shared her experience as a Principal Service Designer at Intuit and NASA. A good deal of the work focused on creating the conditions to do the work.

How this works: A journey problem is traced to a capability gap. A capability gap is linked to funding or governance. A prototype informs decisions upstream. Tactical work feeds strategic change.

This does not mean every project becomes transformation work. It means tactical interventions are designed with system awareness. Designers know which problems they can fix locally and which need escalation.

Sarah Drummond’s full-stack service design makes service design legible to leaders. It shows how experience issues connect to cost, risk, and outcomes. It keeps the Org structure in play as a design variable– subject to transformation, learning and change.

A Simple Diagnostic Question: There is an easy test to clarify what kind of work you are doing.

Ask: If we fix this experience, will the system produce fewer failures next time?

If the answer is no, the work is tactical. That is fine. Just name it honestly.
If the answer is yes, the work is strategic. It likely requires leadership sponsorship and time.

Problems start when teams promise the second while doing the first.