Service Design
Service Design at GitLab
Service Design helps GitLab connect teams, match business goals with user needs, and create better experiences inside and outside the platform — leading to happier users and customers, fewer support tickets, and driving deeper adoption.
What is Service Design?
Service Design is the practice of shaping End-to-End Experiences across touchpoints, teams, and systems. It serves as a bridge between Business Strategy, User Needs, and Delivery Teams, by looking at:
- Front stage: what users see and interact with
- Back stage: the processes, policies, and systems that enable those interactions
GitLab specific example of a journey that we can understand using Service Design mindset:
| Step | Hearing about GitLab | trying the product | Concinving their organisation to become a customer | Adopting it in their org-wide tech stack |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front Stage | A conference | gitlab.com | internal and external meetings | Renewal meeting, gitlab.com |
| Back Stage | DevRel | Product | Sales | Customer Success |
Who Service Designers Work With
Service Design works alongside Product Design, Product Management, Engineering Management, and UX Research as an accelerator, connecting insights and solutions into a holistic view of the full journey. By aligning strategy, design, and execution, it boosts the impact of each discipline and helps GitLab deliver cohesive, end-to-end experiences.
What to Expect from Service Design
Service Design helps solve coordination and alignment challenges that slow teams down, especially when:
- Journeys span multiple touchpoints or teams, but no one owns the full experience.
- Service Design maps the end-to-end journey so you can identify handoffs, gaps, and who needs to be in the room
- Stakeholder alignment is required across functions, while there are conflicting priorities or understanding.
- Service Design facilitates alignment through sharing artifacts cross-functional workshops that create a common language.
- Digital solutions alone won’t solve the problem, e.g. the success of the product / feature relies on offline processes, human touchpoints as well.
- Service Design reveals what needs to happen behind the scenes and helps design the full service delivery.
- Research insights need to inform strategy across teams
- Service Design synthesizes fragmented knowledge into strategic artifacts, e.g. blueprints, experience visions, future use cases, that guide prioritisation.
Methods and Deliverables
Service Design Methods
Effective service design starts with research. Though not explicitly called out below, all of these methods rely on synthesizing evidence from users, stakeholders, and systems into shared understanding.
- Journey mapping: visualising end to end experience form user’s perspective across touchpoints
- Service blueprinting: maps what happens frontstage (user-facing) and backstage (internal processes, systems and policies) to deliver the experience
- Stakeholder mapping: identifies all parties involved in delivering or being affected by a service and their relationships
- Experience visioning / future casting: creates aspirational views of the ideal service experience to align teams on direction
- Co-creation workshops: facilitates sessions that bring cross-functional teams together to synthesise insights, ideate, and align on solutions
Here is a good resource to explore SD methods depending on where you are in the product development process.
Typical Deliverables
- Journey maps (as-is, to-be)
- Service blueprints
- Stakeholder maps / ecosystem maps
- Experience visions
- Research Synthesis, e.g. insights reports, opportunity maps, thematic summaries
Our Approach at GitLab
Service Design is part of UX Research at GitLab because research is integral to Service Design, and access to cross-functional experiences and insights is the make-or-break factor for Service Design’s success as a practice. By living in the same function, Service Design has direct access to ongoing research and can quickly synthesize those insights into system-level artifacts that coordinate across teams - preventing the common mistake of creating alignment artifacts based on assumptions rather than real user insights.
Current Focus Areas
As we establish Service Design as a UX discipline in GitLab, we focus on spreading the mindset to build a shared perspective, collaborating cross-functionally to establish a practice, and diving into the Growth Section to immediately add value.
- Growth: Work with Growth Section to map the Trial Experience to have a full picture view of key value moments for different user types. Contribute to strategy, design concepts.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Establish connections with different disciplines and teams to ensure we re-use existing foundations such as journeys, processes, customer overviews, etc.
- Spreading the Mindset: Empower PDs, PMs, UXRs to further adopt a Service Design mindset by building Service Design into the handbook, offering walk-in office hours, and adding to the UX toolkit with SD specific templates.
See who’s working on what in the UX Research and Service Design handbook page.
How Service Design can enable your team
Service Design helps when the value you are delivering to users depends on other teams, stakeholders aren’t aligned, or you need to validate a strategy that works end-to-end before building.
🔎 Clarify before you commit
If you are prioritising work, but not sure how it fits with what other teams are building, or whether it solves the real problem, Service Design can help by:
- Mapping as-is journeys to reveal gaps, overlaps and where users actually struggle
- Surfacing existing knowledge before starting new research
- Scoping research around the highest-risk assumptions
What you get:
- Product Managers: Validate assumptions and scope the problem space before committing to a roadmap
- Product Designers: See how your feature fits into the broader user journey and identify handoffs that needs design attention
- Engineering Managers: Understand dependencies across systems and teams before planning sprints
💬 Align teams on priorities
If your team, your peers, and your stakeholders have different understanding of what needs to happen, and see risks of rework or missed dependencies, Service Design can help by:
- Creating shared artifacts (Service Blueprints, storyboards, system maps) that make the current state and desired state visible to everyone
- Translating research findings into a shared Experience Vision that aids roadmap decisions
- Facilitating cross-functional workshops to surfacing concerns early and build alignment
What you get:
- Product managers: translate research into a clear product vision that justifies roadmap decisions to leadership
- Product designers: co-create artifacts that communicate design intent and get stakeholder buy-in
- Engineering managers: surface technical dependencies early so you can plan architecture and resourcing appropriately.
✨ Derisk strategic decisions
If you are making big bets (new product area, AI features, platform shift) but aren’t confident the full experience will work or that you are targeting the right users, Service Design can help by:
- Building business cases for strategic topics that connect business objectives to solution designs
- Creating use-cases and scenarios to ensure you are solving for the right customer segments
- Prototyping across touchpoints to validate the entire service flow, not just the UI
What you get:
- Product managers: strengthen business cases with scenarios that connect user needs to business goals and ROI
- Product designers: validate concepts against real workflows and ensure consistency across all touchpoints
- Engineering managers: anticipate downstream impacts of architecture decisions on user experiences and operations.
How to bring Service Design into your day-to-day work
Wearing the Service Design Hat in Your Role
Even if you’re not a Service Designer, you can apply a service design mindset. Here are some practical things you can do:
For Product Managers, ask the following questions often:
- What do we know about what happens before and after the touchpoints I’m responsible for?
- Who else needs to be involved for [add feature] to work end-to-end?
- What assumptions are we making about the users’ context here?
For Product Designers, think often about:
- How does my design connect to the rest of the user’s journey?
- What needs to happen in the backend/offline to make this experience possible?
- Are we designing for the experience we want, or the constraints we have today?
Working with Service Design at GitLab
Service Design work will be prioritised by UX Research Managers in collaboration with Service Designer based on our strategic priorities. We also want to offer ongoing support for 2-4 hours/week through:
- Slack: Tag the service designer in your area on #ux-research for quick support/questions
- Walk-in hours: Join weekly office hours (Check the UX Calendar for upcoming sessions) for sparring or feedback
- Issues: For larger efforts, create an issue after a meeting/walk-in hour in agreement with Service Designer to prioritize the work
Resources
Here is an introduction Slide deck and a video from UX Forum where we introduce Service Design at GitLab. Some external resources that can be further helpful:
- Service Design 101 - NN/G
- Good Services
- Service Design Show podcast
- A tale of two coffee shops video
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