Learning Service Design on the Job + Leading a Design Team + Service Design Standards with Tracey Williams — DT101 E47

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tracey Williams, a Service Design Director for Absa Bank in South Africa, discusses learning service design on the job, growing design skills on her team, and building organizational service design standards with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host.</span></p> <p><strong>Show Summary</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tracey’s career didn’t begin in design; she started in financial services, and went through a graduate program focused on business targets and goals. She’d always had an interest in problem-solving, and while working at Absa, she got involved in numerous projects that she found new and exciting outside of her specific role. She had studied marketing, and found that much of the old-school marketing thinking aligned with some of the thinking in design spaces.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">She submitted an idea to a social entrepreneurship course and was accepted. Tracey then proceeded to learn service design and design thinking as she led her team through development of the idea. Her biggest challenge during the project was using the tools of design, which were still new to her; she had to learn through doing, and through failure and then trying again. She learned that design is about looking at a problem from a different perspective.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tracey hosted the first Absa Women Forum at the Wentworth Angels headquarters to celebrate the role of single mothers and women.</span></p> <p><strong>Listen in to learn:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Tracey developed her design skills</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What service design skills she has learned on her job</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why she was called a design “Padawan”</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Who Tracey is bringing onto her team for service design</span></li> <