Senior Service Designer

Are you a Senior Service Designer who has been in the thick of it, shaping, testing, learning and delivering products or services in complex environments?

We are looking for someone with at least five years of practitioner experience in design, research, facilitation, and transformation across diverse organisations and communities. We would welcome applicants from inside and outside of consultancy.

We’re a growing team entering new areas of opportunity, so it’s an exciting time to join us on that journey.

Closing date for applications: Monday 8th June 12pm

How to apply: Send your CV and a short cover letter to careers@perago.co.uk. Tell us about a service design project you have delivered, what made it successful, and what you learned.

To find out more, you can visit our website: https://l1nq.com/gulm208

Role description:

Our Senior Service Designer is an autonomous practitioner who leads complex design and research programmes from discovery to delivery. You will work across Perago’s portfolio of Welsh and UK public sector programmes, as well as with our growing private sector portfolio, leading the design work on major commissions, shaping approaches from scratch, and delivering outputs to a standard that is credible with senior clients and programme boards.

Three capability areas define this role. These are: service design and transformation with real public/private sector depth; rigorous, independent design research; and strategic and policy design thinking that considers systems in developing problem framing, opportunities and solutions.

Key responsibilities:

• Service and systems design – lead end-to-end service design from discovery through to implementation, working across complex organisations and system environments.
• Facilitation and co-design – plan and lead workshops that build shared understanding across organisations with different priorities, helping clients think in a design-informed way.
• Strategic design – operate at the level of problem framing and systems thinking, using rigorous research and evidence to help clients ask better questions before the design work begins and shaping approaches that account for complexity, behaviour change and interdependency across organisations and systems.
• Policy design – work at the intersection of design and public policy, drawing on qualitative research, test-and-learn and systems design to connect service-level design to the policy intent it is meant to deliver, and to make visible where the policy-to-delivery chain is breaking down.
• Delivery and quality – lead design work across one or more major programmes simultaneously, producing outputs to a senior-client standard and supporting the wider team to do the same.
• Practice and business development – build trusted relationships with clients and partners, and contribute to bids, proposals, and thought leadership that reflect Perago’s evidence base and voice.

Experience:

Design careers don’t follow a straight line. If you recognise yourself in most of what follows and the work excites you, we want to hear from you.

• At least five years of hands-on service design experience in UK public and/or private sector context.
• A genuine toolkit: service blueprints, journey mapping, process mapping, prototyping, test-and-learn, workshops, research design, synthesis, low/no-code experimentation. You know which to reach for and when, and you can explain your choices to a client who has never heard of any of them.
• The ability to work across the full arc of a programme, from early discovery and problem framing through to implementation support.
• Comfortable influencing and working alongside policy, delivery and technology teams, bringing structure and clarity to complex challenges without imposing a design process that does not fit.
• Experience leading and facilitating workshops with frontline practitioners and senior leaders alike, and the judgment to handle a room when it is not going the way you planned.
• The ability to design and lead qualitative research in the service of good design. You know how to get to insight that shapes decision-making.
• An understanding of how design connects to policy and systems change. You can work at the level of policy intent as well as service delivery, and operate credibly in spaces where design, public policy, and organisational change meet. You do not need to have come from a policy background, but you need to be comfortable in that territory.
• Able to help a client ask a better question before the design work begins, and contribute to how a problem or brief is framed.
• Comfortable working in conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. The brief will not always be clean, the scope will shift, and the client will sometimes still be working out what they want. You can hold that without losing momentum or quality.
• A point of view on the field and practice. You know where good practice is being developed, whether that is in government design teams, policy design practice, the private sector or at the intersection of systems thinking and public sector reform.
• Experience of working across private, public or third sectors is an advantage. The public sector is currently the core of our work, but the most interesting design thinking often comes from people who have not stayed in one lane.
• A strong sense of purpose and values to match ours: openness, collaboration, a growth mindset and getting things done – and the generosity to bring others with you as you do it.

Requirements added by the job poster

• Valid driver’s license