Sam Stern, Service Design Lead at LinkedIn and longtime CX thinker, joins TheyDo’s Jochem van der Veer to explore how journeys, data, and behavioral science shape memorable experiences. With a background spanning Forrester, New Balance, and his own CX Patterns podcast, Sam reveals why perfection is overrated and why some friction, when engineered well, can actually deepen customer value.

They dig into good friction, employee experience design, cross-silo collaboration, and how AI is reshaping research workflows. Sam challenges long held CX doctrines, offering a fresh lens on how to create experiences that customers remember and teams can deliver with confidence.

Guest Bio

Sam Stern is the Service Design Lead at LinkedIn, where he focuses on improving the employee and customer facing experiences that power the platform’s global ecosystem. Before LinkedIn, Sam spent nearly 16 years as a Principal Analyst at Forrester, shaping industry thinking on customer experience. He has also led CX at New Balance and is the creator of the CX Patterns podcast and newsletter. Sam is known for blending behavioral science, service design, and practical business insight to help organizations craft experiences that matter.

Key Takeaways

• Good friction can enhance memorability when intentionally designed, contrasted with the CX habit of removing all friction.
• Behavioral science principles like anticipation, contrast, and peak moments remain underused in customer experience design.
• Service design at LinkedIn prioritizes improving the employee experience for 12,000+ customer facing roles to strengthen customer outcomes.
• Journey readouts become dramatically more effective when grounded in video evidence from real users.
• AI accelerates research workflows but amplifies, rather than replaces, human judgment and context setting.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Sam Stern

02:00 Why another CX book

05:00 The concept of good friction

08:30 When friction helps and when it harms

12:00 Ethical considerations in engineered friction

16:00 How service design operates inside LinkedIn

21:00 Secrets to effective journey readouts

24:00 Helping product teams see beyond their scope

26:45 How prioritization works across product and CX

29:00 Journey atlas and cross org context

32:00 Blending CX, UX, and service design roles

35:00 Business impact and full stack builder

39:00 AI’s role in research and insight development

43:00 Can AI ever understand context

49:00 The future of service design and CX

58:00 Why silos aren’t going away

59:00 Where to find Sam

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