Lead Service Designer

Your role

As a Lead, you’ll either own the project lead role or act as lead practitioner, depending on the size and complexity of the engagement. You’ll have input into — or ownership of — project planning and set-up, ensuring you and the team can do your best work.

You’ll still be hands-on but balanced with leading others. Senior client stakeholders and project teams will see you as a trusted expert. You’ll build strong relationships with these groups, listen to their needs, and manage expectations with honesty. You’ll work with the Head of Experience Design and senior leadership to identify opportunities to extend current engagements or open new ones.

Delivery Leadership

In this role, you will:
• Lead complex service and product design engagements end to end and define service strategies and future state architectures
• Lead multidisciplinary teams to prototype, test, and launch new services and design and run research and insight programmes
• Facilitate design sprints, experiments, and co-creation activities and create detailed service blueprints, journeys, and propositions that can scale
• Understand organisational, technical, and policy constraints and turn them into opportunity
• Guide clients through complex decisions and influence long-term change

Capability and Practice Development
You will also:
• Co-lead the evolution of Experience Design methodology, tools, and quality standards across the practice
• Mentor and develop service designers across grades, supporting performance management and career progression
• Shape and contribute to the Experience Design Partnership model and its cross-organisational delivery approach
• Support GDS Centre of Excellence activities including assessment preparation, training, and compliance
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and team development as the practice continues to grow and support business development by contributing to proposals, scoping, and client shaping activities

This is a highly impactful role where you can help lead some of the bravest digital and organisational transformations in the UK.

You can bring your whole self to work. At Capgemini building an inclusive future is part of everyday life and will be part of your working reality. We have built a representative and welcoming environment, for everyone.

Your skills and experience

You are a confident, strategic design practitioner with experience leading complex programmes and multidisciplinary teams. You bring a strong blend of business acumen, systems thinking, human centred design craft, client leadership, and delivery discipline.

Essential-
• Experience leading service design through full lifecycle including piloting and live operation, not just strategy or discovery phases and a track record of influencing senior stakeholders in complex, multi-stakeholder, or regulated environments
• Evidence of building design capability — whether establishing standards, mentoring designers, standing up new practices, or shaping assessment frameworks and strong facilitation skills: you can design and run workshops, design sprints, and co-creation sessions with confidence
• Fluency in service design methods: blueprinting, journey mapping, systems mapping, proposition development and experience managing and leading multidisciplinary teams, with strong feedback and performance development instincts
• Comfort operating in the gap between design and delivery, particularly in agile or hybrid environments and the ability to manage upwards, initiate difficult conversations, and challenge constructively at all levels

Highly Desirable-
•Experience working across multiple sectors — public sector, financial services, energy, healthcare, or commercial — with the ability to adapt to different governance and delivery contexts
• Experience with GDS Service Standard and assessment processes, or equivalent quality and compliance frameworks in regulated industries
• Understanding of accessibility requirements and regulatory constraints relevant to service design
• Experience with developer experience research, quantitative survey design, or operational service measurement
• Familiarity and commitment to developing the skills needed to design services that make use of AI — working with technology and architecture teams to bring AI‑enabled services, experiences and ideas to life.

Your Background
Our design team is an incredibly talented group of hybrids — and that’s something we embrace. The team includes people with backgrounds in design, complex digital transformation, organisational change and design, strategy, and business analysis. We know unicorns don’t exist, but we value practitioners who span multiple areas of service design with depth in at least one. Whether your background is in service design, product strategy, organisational design, UX, product, or CX transformation — what matters is your ability to lead, think systemically, and deliver.