Maija Mäenpää is a Helsinki-based Senior Service/Strategic Designer of Futurice, building strategies and concepts that elevate and enhance customer experience, improve employee experience and meet desired business and sustainability objectives. The main driver of her design work is to help organizations become more human-centered by placing people at the heart of their visions and actions. Pursuing this passion every day as a consultant, Maija additionally enjoys sharing her service design knowledge in the format of lecturing beginner designers.
I think many designers want to ensure even better that their work is sustainable and systemic. At least I do. Therefore, I have found The Systemic Design Framework by the Design Council extremely valuable as a “new iteration” to the Double Diamond Design Process. The framework has been developed to help designers and other professionals across different disciplines and sectors to put people and planet at the heart of design.
The demand for delivering a great customer experience is nothing new, but it’s always fascinating to hear the CX transformation stories from different companies and industries. In this MIT SMR webinar customer experience leaders from DBS Bank, SAS, and CVS Health talk about CX and its relation to digital transformation, data, real-time analytics, and employee experience.
Many organizations state the importance of customer- and employee experience in their strategies, but impactful execution initiatives lag behind. Why? Because organizations fail to build human-centered operating models. I personally enjoyed this concrete case study about Nissan with clear perspectives on how to organize around customer journeys to transform both EX & CX.
"When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change”, stated psychologist Carl Rogers. I really like this statement and learned it recently through an episode of The Psychology Podcast where an award-winning behavioral scientist Katy Milkman shares perspectives about change. Learning about the human mind and behavior is useful for the designer's work too (to understand people and their experiences differently) and for personal and professional development when understanding yourself better.
As a kid, I loved drawing, crafts, and playing video games to solve problems, imagine worlds, and build structures. I knew quite early that I would like to do something creative in my career. So when the time came after high school, I applied and got into Aalto University to study industrial design.
Through the studies, I better understood the meaning of design in various contexts and how design can change and alter things on a bigger scale. Consequently, when first hearing about service design during my BA, I started minor studies in the School of Business and dived deeper into topics of strategy work, business development, and leadership. This multidisciplinary combination of fields was extremely valuable to eventually becoming a strategic designer.
What would you tell yourself when you started your career?
I would tell myself to proactively ask more stupid questions, learn from mistakes (instead of being afraid of them), and not to stress so much about work. I would remind myself that as a professional you will never be ready or “perfect”, and neither will be the world you are trying to shape by design. Vice versa, the world is changing even faster and becoming ever more complex and fuzzy. Governments and organizations need to adapt to it across all industries and sectors which means there are always new challenges and learning to comprehend and embrace.
Something you feel very grateful for when looking back on your career?
I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by great minds and the high encouragement of colleagues, clients, friends, and family. In retrospect, all my biggest learnings come from being thrown into the deep end, yet still getting support from super talented and diverse experts. Moreover, I’m grateful for all the inspiring opportunities that have landed on me over the years, thanks to people paying attention to my strengths and interests. Time in life is limited, so it is important to follow your intuition and work on something that’s meaningful to you and others.
Most interesting design cases you’ve worked with? I’ve worked in many different industries and with big and small Finnish and international companies. However, one common nominator for the most interesting cases is bringing empathy to strategies and operations. In most inspiring cases I’ve got to conduct a deeper customer- and employee research, co-create a vision and roadmap forward, and finally see the value of the work to people and business during different change initiatives. As concrete examples, I really enjoyed developing concepts for better employee experience in the real estate sector and helping an industrial corporation to build more human-centric and data-driven operations, ways of working, and communications.
Where do you see yourself in the future?
I’ve always been annoyed about short-sightedness and ignorance on systemic change, leading to building solutions, structures, and patterns that answer the wrong questions. Humans, the big picture, and future needs should not be ignored because of siloed and poor decision-making.
So in the future, I wish to see myself working in diverse and multidisciplinary contexts, in a role where I push organizations or other institutions to make more people-centric and future-resilient decisions. For example, overseeing and facilitating a positive impact on customer- and employee experience on a strategic, holistic, and international scale would be something I would love to experience in the future!
In other areas of life, I see and wish for nothing more than being healthy and spending time with my closest ones who are well and happy. And maybe, having a dog.
Jobs
Lead Designer / Strategist
Stockholm
If you know to leverage business metrics to demonstrate the value of design, you would find this role super exciting. Take the opportunity to shape and influence our client's business and raise their benchmark and impact people's lives.
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