Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimizing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys.

Traditional economics draws a clear distinction between goods and services. Goods are tangible and consumable — pens, sunglasses, or shoes. Services are instantaneous exchanges that are intangible and do not result in ownership—medical treatment, the postal service, or public transportation. 

Today, there is no longer a clear distinction between goods and services. A continuum of goods–services exists with a plethora of combined products and services in the middle. For example, a song (an mp3 file) is a product that can be accessed via a service like Spotify or Apple Music. To the user, the difference between a product and service—owning the sound file versus streaming the song—can be close to identical while behind the scenes they are quite different.