What LinkedIn learned about designing memorable journeys - with Sam Stern

Sam Stern, Service Design Lead at LinkedIn and host of the CX Patterns podcast, joins Jochem van der Veer to challenge one of customer experience's most sacred assumptions: that all friction must be eliminated. With over two decades of experience including 16 years as a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and leadership roles at New Balance, Sam shares how behavioral science principles like the peak-end rule and anticipation building remain criminally underutilized—and why strategic friction can make experiences more memorable than perfect smoothness ever could.

Here's why you don't want to miss this episode

The enterprise pause that makes customers happier

Enterprise Rent-A-Car deliberately creates a line at their counter—for exactly 10 seconds. One employee works while six others wait behind the door. When the line forms and frustration starts to build, the door opens and employees flood out to serve everyone instantly. Customers remember this as exceptional service, even though having all seven employees at the counter from the start would have been objectively faster. Sam calls this "good friction"—controlled, brief frustration that makes the resolution feel like a peak moment.

Where friction is actually doing you a favor

Not all experiences should be frictionless. When LinkedIn customers are posting jobs, running marketing campaigns, or reaching out to potential leads, speed isn't always the goal. Sam explains why slowing customers down with additional steps and questions helps them make better decisions—even when they complain about it. The key is distinguishing between mundane transactions that should be instant and consequential decisions that deserve deliberation.

Why CX teams still ignore behavioral science

Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule revolutionized how we understand memory and experience—yet most CX teams never implemented it. Sam expected organizations to create sub-teams focused exclusively on endings and peak moments. Instead, teams continued optimizing everything equally, missing the opportunity to engineer memorable experiences by creating contrast between friction and relief, frustration and resolution.

From CX outsider to product insider

Sam's team was previously a disconnected customer experience function with limited influence. Their transformation came from doing valuable employee research that product teams desperately needed—research on the 12,000+ customer-facing employees at LinkedIn that UX teams didn't have capacity to cover. This work earned them integration into the product organization, demonstrating that CX teams gain influence by solving problems product teams actually have, not by advocating for abstract customer-centricity.

The full-stack builder philosophy

LinkedIn is pushing engineers to do qualitative research and designers to ship code through AI-powered tools. Sam's team is building agents that let product managers query research insights conversationally, get pointed to relevant video clips, and understand context without waiting for the service design team. This doesn't eliminate roles—it multiplies impact. Five service designers can now influence far more of the organization because their insights are accessible on demand.

Breaking silos is the wrong goal

Sam is a "silo contrarian." In a company LinkedIn's size, silos are necessary structure, not dysfunction to eliminate. The realistic approach is enabling information flow across silos through research that shows one team's solution could work for another's problem. Wishing for a silo-free organization is like hoping Santa Claus exists—it sounds nice but ignores reality. Better to work effectively within structure than chase organizational unicorns.

From artifacts to action

This episode offers a refreshing counternarrative to the "remove all friction" orthodoxy dominating customer experience. Sam's emphasis on behavioral science, strategic friction, and memorable moments over perfect smoothness provides a framework for creating experiences people actually remember positively—not just complete efficiently.

His journey from disconnected CX function to integrated product team demonstrates that influence comes from doing work that's genuinely valuable to product organizations, not from evangelizing customer experience as an abstract concept. The research that got his team embedded wasn't about NPS or journey mapping—it was about understanding employee workflows in ways that directly informed product roadmaps.

For service designers and CX practitioners struggling with influence, drowning in journey mapping projects that lead nowhere, or wondering how AI will change their role, Sam's honest reflections on what works at scale make this essential listening. His message is pragmatic: understand behavioral science, engineer strategic friction, work within organizational reality, and use AI to multiply your impact rather than fear it will replace you.

The future of customer experience isn't frictionless—it's strategically memorable.

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