Interview with Ulla Jones In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks with Ulla Jones, Business Designer at OP Financial Group, the biggest banking and insurance group in Finland. Her company is currently working on building an in-house design team, the first of its kind in Finland. Ulla Jones is a Business Designer at OP Financial Group, a Finnish banking and insurance company. She works to bring customer insights and empathy to the heart of all new service development.
Jesse Grimes: The topic of the previous issue of Touchpoint was on the growth of in-house service design capabilities, and I'm aware that you've been involved in setting this up such a capability within your current employer. Can you share some of your experiences so far, and advice on those who may be going down the same path?
Ulla Jones: The challenges we face are often related to the way projects are constructed. The outcome is set before a project begins, most money is allocated to the technical solution instead of creating and testing the business case, and sometimes it happens that if the customer insight leads to an unfamiliar direction, the project is repackaged into a traditional banking or insurance case. To fix this we try to involve ourselves as early in the project as possible so that we can help to formulate the project description to allow new discoveries and
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unpredictable outcomes. We also make a point never to work alone and come back with a readily-solved case. We are always part of a multidisciplinary team and involve everyone in customer research, interviews and analysis. This helps to penetrate the service-design methods further into the organisation so that they become useful and everyday tools for anyone wanting to take a customercentric approach. When building an in-house designteam, first make sure your company is truly ready. Designers will challenge your status-quo, ask difficult questions and challenge the ‘Hippos’ (highest-paidperson’s-opinion). Is your company ready to lose hierarchy, take risks and test out new things at a continuously growing pace? If you answered yes, then by all means, go for it! But remember to have a contingency plan, so that the designers you hire will have a room to grow and develop along with your company.
