Principal Service Designer

These Grade 6 Principal Service Designer roles operate at a strategic level within Digital Delivery, bridging policy design and digital delivery to ensure services are coherent, user-centred and deliverable.

The roles provide design leadership across multiple complex services, setting direction for service design activity and assuring quality across teams. By embedding systems thinking and user-centred design early in the policy lifecycle, these roles help prevent fragmented delivery, reduce the risk of costly rework, and ensure digital services are designed as an integral part of policy rather than as an afterthought.

Principal Service Designers work closely with programme directors, service managers and policy teams, as well as delivery partners, to shape end-to-end service outcomes.

The roles also involve leading and coordinating other service designers, aligning their work with the wider service landscape and helping to create a consistent experience across Defra services. Principal Service Designers will need to work as a close community, developing a shared understanding of services from the user’s point of view and looking beyond Defra’s organisational structures to identify how services connect in practice.

Responsibilities:

• Leads discussions at senior level and negotiates change to support the delivery of better end to end services
• Prioritises understanding needs and behaviours of users to underpin the services the organisation designs
• Sets standards for service design quality, output and impact
• Ensures services meet the Government Service Standard
• Ensures teams design services accessible to a full range of users, including those with accessibility needs.

Skills and Experience:

• The successful candidate will be a senior service design practitioner with extensive experience of delivering and leading user-centred design in complex government environments.
• They will be comfortable operating at a strategic level, influencing senior stakeholders and navigating ambiguity, while maintaining a strong focus on user
  needs and service outcomes.

They will bring the following essential qualities and experience:

• Strategic service design expertise, with a proven track record of leading service design across large, complex programmes and influencing policy and programme-level decision-making.
• Strong government UCD experience, including delivery to GDS standards and applying user-centred design methods across discovery, alpha, beta and live.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, with experience working across policy teams, arm’s-length bodies, suppliers and senior leaders from other professions.
• Systems thinking capability, able to see and design for whole service ecosystems rather than isolated services or transactions.
• Leadership and people development experience, including directing, mentoring and coordinating service designers to ensure consistent, high-quality outcomes.
• Resilience and pragmatism, able to adapt to a changing policy landscape while maintaining focus on long-term service quality and user outcomes.
• Confidence to challenge constructively, advocating for users and user-centred approaches in environments where operational or business pressures may dominate.