Service design promised to connect the dots. So why are service designers inside the same company still not talking to each other?
Khayyam "Kai" Lasi is Journey Management Program Lead at Autodesk, where he's spent years scaling journey management from a lone title on an org chart to a company-wide operating system. In this conversation, he and Jochem get into why service design siloes itself from within, what it actually means to move from journey mapping to journey architecture, why "ownership" is the wrong mental model for CX practitioners, and how AI can reduce the internal politics that keeps teams from doing their best work.
ABOUT KAI
Khayyam "Kai" Lasi is Journey Management Program Lead at Autodesk. His career path has been far from linear - he moved from actuarial science into customer experience after discovering a stronger passion for people and solving complex problems, going on to build deep expertise in customer support, CX leadership, and journey management across Toronto startups, Scotiabank, and Autodesk. Over the past three and a half years at Autodesk, he's been foundational in scaling a journey management practice that now spans multiple teams and has influenced how the organisation hires and structures CX work. He's best known for combining analytical rigour with a systems-level view of customer experience - and for being unafraid to call out where the service design field is failing itself.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
➝ Service design siloes aren't just an org problem - they're a people problem that no tool or framework will fix.
➝ Journey management is the operating system that keeps service design from becoming the wild west.
➝ "Shepherd" beats "owner" - you can't shepherd a journey without building a flock of contributors.
➝ Insight grain size matters: product managers don't want "onboarding is bad," they want capability-level specifics.
➝ AI can create good baselines and remove language barriers between roles - but humans still have to come together.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
02:07 Why service designers inside the same company don't talk to each other
05:12 How organisational siloes corrupt the service design practice within them
06:39 Journey management as the operating system for service design
09:33 How Autodesk moved from a design-mature company to a journey management culture
13:06 Building a journey architecture: heat-mapping, lifecycle data, and shared understanding
19:49 From mapping stage to management stage - what comes next
22:00 The community of practice gap and why standards need to be agreed, not assumed
26:12 Lessons from agile: the danger of standardising flexibility out of a practice
27:55 "Search before you create" - a standard worth fighting for
34:48 How AI enables governance, reduces duplication, and removes language barriers between teams
40:58 Organisational memory and the decision map concept
49:29 Shepherding vs ownership - why vocabulary shapes culture
55:02 How to reconcile journey thinking with team structures in complex organisations
01:03:14 The one agent worth building next: internal context + accountability mapping
01:07:42 How to reach Kai and closing thoughts
LINKEDIN PROFILES
Khayyam Lasi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/khayyam-lasi/Jochem van der Veer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jochemvanderveer/
THEYDO
Learn more about Journey Management with TheyDo: https://www.theydo.com
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