What if You Could Prove Your Impact With Just One Goal? / Stacey Barr / Ep. #237
Service Design Show
What makes goals and measures so challenging
Stacey outlines the four parts—goals, measures, targets, actions—and common confusions that break measurement.
The things service design professionals have to deal with...
Okay, so your boss tells you drive to a place with “a great view,” hands a full tank of gas, and wished good luck. Oh and by the way, we need to be there in 30-days, no compass, no map.
Now take a guess, how likely is it that after a month you'll have arrived at exactly the location they had in mind. I'd say anything higher than 0 is an optimistic perspective.
This sounds pretty absurd, right? But I'm not making it up.
But how often have you been in that exact situation at work?
The destination is vague, nobody can tell you where you are today, and there’s no way to know if your actions are actually moving you in the right direction.
And the cherry on top is when you're asked for hard evidence that you're getting closer, while someone else gets praised for reporting a higher average speed than last week. Yeah, but dude, are we even moving in the right direction? So painful and frustrating.
If you didn’t know better, you might think this is the plot of a bad comedy. But based on the conversations I'm having, this isn't an exception; it's the daily reality for most of you.
So, what are we going to do about it?
Even though the situation might feel a bit hopeless, the good news is that it’s certainly not.
Last year, I had Stacey Barr on the show to talk about measurement. She’s spent her career becoming an expert in using measures as a truth seeker.
Guess what that conversation became the most-watched episode of the year.
In this episode, Stacey is back to show us how to untangle this mess.
There’s a remarkably simple process, that looks a lot like design, to get from vague goals to meaningful measures, clear targets, and effective actions.
It’s a method that gives you real leverage to achieve the impact you want to make.
So if you want to learn how to put measures in place that are actually meaningful, prove your work is moving the needle, and do it with more confidence, definitely don’t miss this episode.
What's becoming clear to me is that we’re actually really good at this. We thrive in scenarios where things are undefined. We know how to figure stuff out and iterate our way forward. So once you grasp that finding the right measurements is just another design challenge, you might actually start looking forward the process...
Enjoy and keep making a positive impact!
Be well
~ Marc
--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---
00:00 Welcome to Episode 237
03:45 Measurement's surprising popularity
04:30 Stacey Barr on Service Design
06:00 Breaking down the measurement puzzle
09:00 Measuring for empowerment
10:00 addressing the gap
16:30 Company cultures
22:30 Beyond shipping stuff
23:30 The problem when starting with measures
24:00 What does influence actually mean
27:00 Reverse engineering the goal
29:00 The Net Promoter Score Trap
32:00 Measuring across silos
34:00 Challenge of individual KPIs and quotas
37:00 Strategies for creating paradigm shifts
40:30 Setting meaningful targets
45:45 Challenge of human-related data
52:45 defining and measuring the gap
56:45 Casuality vs correlation
01:1:45 The patience to shift big goals
1:03:45 The PUMP Results Map
1:04:15 Introducing PUMP Light
1:07:00 Where to Sign Up
1:07:45 Discount for the program
1:08:15 Question to ponder
--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceybarr/
- The PuMP Lite Program - https://pump.academy/pumplite/
- https://pump.academy/
--- [ 3. PROMO ] ---
Use code SDS10 to get 10% off the PuMP Lite program, running November 11-13 and 25-26, 2025.
--- [ 4. CIRCLE ] ---
Join our private community for in-house service design professionals.
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