Rewards & Challenges of In-House Practice

While quantitative metrics provide a broad overview, the in-house experience is deeply shaped by qualitative factors like organizational culture and long-term impact. To understand this, we analyzed open-ended feedback from hundreds of in-house professionals. The following charts visualize the most common themes, highlighting what these in-house professionals value most and the hurdles they navigate within their organizations.

Most rewarding

What is the biggest benefit for you of working in-house?

In-house roles often offer a unique opportunity for "Deep Knowledge & Context" and seeing "Long-Term Impact." The chart below displays the percentage of all mentions that each theme represents, highlighting the most rewarding aspects of internal practice.

Biggest challenges

What’s your #1 struggle or challenge working in-house?

"Design Maturity & Buy-in" and "Bureaucracy & Politics" frequently emerge as significant hurdles. The chart below shows the proportional representation of each challenge reported by in-house service design professionals.

Our Methodology

A crucial part of understanding the in-house experience lies not just in quantitative data but in the qualitative, open-ended feedback from professionals. To tap into this, we asked two fundamental questions: "What is the biggest benefit for you of working in-house?" and "What’s your #1 struggle or challenge working in-house?"

The responses were varied, personal, and insightful. To analyze this rich text data, we employed a hybrid approach combining human expertise with artificial intelligence:

  1. Data Extraction: First, we isolated and compiled all unique, anonymous responses for each question.
  2. Manual Theming: Our team then manually reviewed these responses to identify recurring patterns, ideas, and sentiments. From this analysis, we defined a set of distinct, overarching themes for both the rewards and the challenges.
  3. AI-Powered Categorization: With these human-defined themes as a guide, we utilized the Gemini 3.0 API to programmatically categorize each individual response, assigning it to the most fitting theme.

This methodology ensures that the final categories are grounded in a human understanding of the nuances of the in-house experience, while the AI provides the scale and consistency needed to classify hundreds of responses accurately.