From Local Wins to Global Impact:
Changing the Way We Do Service Design
For the Audience
Attendees will learn practical techniques to:
✅ Find true service process bottlenecks and eliminate inefficiencies
✅ Map information and value flows to uncover hidden dependencies
✅ Apply process optimization techniques to solve complex service challenges
✅ Stop reacting to every pain point, prioritizing what is essential first.
Case Study & Insights
This session will blend practical frameworks, visual models, and real-world case studies—including a transformation that increased throughput by 40% without additional resources.
Talk Overview
A talk that bridges the gap between service design thinking and proven system optimization approaches that have transformed our service handling 24,000 assets and $60M annually.
In service design, we often focus on individual touchpoints and localized improvements. But what if this approach is fundamentally limiting our impact? This session introduces powerful frameworks from operations and systems thinking that can revolutionize how we approach service design challenges.
Key Themes
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🔍Optimize here or there: Why improving individual pain points of a service often fails to improve the whole system—and can sometimes make it worse
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🔄 Flow-Based Thinking: How identifying and managing bottlenecks transforms service performance, illustrated through our real-world transformation of a high-volume asset processing service
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⚡Handoffs as critical connection points: Why service failures often happen between touchpoints, not within them, and methods to address these invisible pain points (bonus: why Blueprints are over)
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📊 Metrics that matter: Moving beyond satisfaction scores to system-level measurements that predict actual service performance
About the speaker
Ricardo's no ordinary design guru. He's spent 30+ years shaking things up across hospitality, education, healthcare, and retail. His playbook? Crafting service concepts, running experience audits, and streamlining processes for clients far and wide.
But wait, there's more. Ricardo's got serious academic chops too - we're talking 6,000+ hours in the classroom. He's mentored award-winning students and taught service design at SCAD, the US's design powerhouse.
Now heading up design at Matilha Estúdio, one of Brazil's OG Service Design shops, Ricardo's bringing his A-game to this talk.
