Ben Holliday

This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You will find posts about digital transformation, design and leadership. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn. In 2022 I published a book for TPXimpact, Multiplied.

Latest posts and feed

Seniority in Design: personal responsibility

Simple models

The importance of frameworks and first principles in service design

Seniority in design: empathy both ways

Hypotheses in user research and discovery

The horizon and the next steps

Seniority in design: proximity and closeness

Learning to prototype is more important than learning to code

What’s on my bookshelf this winter/spring (2019)

A design state of mind

The roundup. January (and some of February) 2019

2018 – End of year review

Ambiguity and design

The roundup. November 2018

Prompts for design leaders working with product teams

For the love of the blog

Shared working definitions

What makes a design education?

There is no digital service design

Seniority, anxiety and dealing with confidence issues

Most read and shared posts

Everything is hypothesis-driven design

Everything can be seen as hypothesis-driven design. How to write down and test assumptions.

Asking the right questions to frame the problem

This is something that many teams struggle with. These 5 questions will get you started.

Service design starts with user needs

An approach to understanding user needs. From Leading Service Design at UX London 2017.

Seniority in design. Are you a senior designer?

The first in a series of posts about seniority in design. What makes a senior designer?

Comparing service design and business design

How service design can bring a new set of approaches and focus to organisations.

How to use service patterns in your organisation

How to work with service patterns to deliver consistency and quality of design at scale.

New models for service ownership and leadership

New questions about how we design, develop, maintain and improve whole services.

New and changing patterns for digital working

Thinking about how we can move from remote to more digital and asynchronous ways of working.

An introduction to service modelling

Exploring a way for organisations to create, test, and scale the design of whole services.