Service Design at SAP: Expanding Influence
The Plot Twist
So there I was, getting comfortable with my design system work, when the SAP Analytics Cloud team threw me a curveball: "Hey, want to join Design Services? It's this internal cluster that does... well, everything that helps designers design better."
Design Services was like the behind-the-scenes crew of a movie production. While product designers were the stars creating features, we were the ones making sure they had the right tools, the right insights, and occasionally, the right reality checks about what users actually wanted.
Think of it as design operations before "DesignOps" became the cool buzzword everyone puts on their LinkedIn.
What Design Services Actually Did
The Mission
Our job was to enable product designers to design better for customers. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It involved everything from customer validation to feature audits, onboarding new designers, and creating challenges that would test whether our designs actually worked in the real world.
Basically, we were the team that asked uncomfortable questions like "But did you actually test this with users?" and "Are you sure customers will understand this?"
My Adventures in Design Services
1. The Golden Path Detective Work
The Case: Figure out how our most valued customers were actually using SAP Analytics Cloud (spoiler alert: not always how we thought they would).
I partnered with senior product experts—people who knew where all the customer complaints were buried—to analyze user workflows. We called it the "Golden Path" because we were trying to find the smoothest route through our complex product.
The Reality Check: Customers were doing some pretty creative workarounds to get things done. Some of these workarounds were genius. Others made us question our life choices as designers.
The Outcome: We identified pain points that the product team didn't even know existed and created a roadmap for making the customer journey less like solving a puzzle and more like... well, using software.
2. The Workflow Challenge Factory
The Mission: Create end-to-end product challenges that could onboard new designers, train product experts, and show customers what our tool could actually do.
Think of it as creating escape rooms, but instead of escaping, you're learning how to use enterprise analytics software. Fun, right?
The Process:
I worked with product experts and business analysts to design these challenges. They needed to be realistic enough to be useful, complex enough to be challenging, but not so complex that people would give up and go get coffee instead.
The Real-World Examples:
Smart Predict Challenge: "Hey, you have historical sales data. Can you train our AI to predict future performance?" (Spoiler: you can, but it takes more clicks than it should)
Stock Analysis Challenge: "Here's COVID-era stock data for Salesforce vs SAP. Make sense of it using our platform." (Plot twist: 2020 was weird for everyone's stock prices)
3. The Feature Audit Detective Agency
These workflow challenges pulled double duty as feature audits. We'd watch people struggle through tasks and think, "Hmm, if three different users all got stuck on the same button, maybe the problem isn't the users."
The Uncomfortable Truth: Sometimes we discovered that features we thought were intuitive were actually... not. At all.
The Silver Lining: Each challenge became a diagnostic tool that helped us identify what needed fixing, what needed better explanation, and what needed to be completely rethought.
The Day-to-Day Reality
What my weeks looked like:
Monday: "Let's design a challenge that teaches people predictive analytics!"
Tuesday: "Why is everyone getting stuck on step 3?"
Wednesday: "Maybe we need better instructions... or a completely different approach"
Thursday: "Testing with actual humans (again)"
Friday: "Iterating based on feedback and existential design questions"
The Collaboration Web:
Working with product experts who knew all the technical details, business analysts who understood customer needs, and occasionally, actual customers who told us exactly what they thought (whether we wanted to hear it or not).
What I Actually Learned
Creating workflow challenges taught me that the gap between "how we think users work" and "how users actually work" is often vast and filled with creative problem-solving that would make MacGyver proud.
The Meta Lesson: The best way to understand if your design works isn't to ask other designers. It's to watch real people try to accomplish real tasks with your product. Their confused faces tell you everything you need to know.
The Behind-the-Scenes Truth
Design Services was where you learned that good design isn't just about making things look pretty or even work well. It's about understanding the entire ecosystem—the tools designers use, the constraints they work within, and the very human reality of how people actually experience your product.
Also, creating challenges that are genuinely useful (and not just busywork) is way harder than it looks.
Want to see the detailed workflows and hear about the time we spent an entire week debugging why everyone kept clicking the wrong button? You know the drill—coffee chat, and I'll walk you through the whole messy, educational process.
PS: This was my final chapter at SAP, and honestly, it felt like the perfect way to round out my understanding of design from every angle—systems, operations, and that crucial space where design meets real-world human confusion.
