Senior Service Designer

Service Designers at AKQA apply empathy, systems thinking, and craftsmanship to strategic insights — designing groundbreaking solutions to human problems. Adept storytellers and fearless innovators, they define interactive experiences, products and services that help create a better future.

Service Design at AKQA is both a strategic and executional discipline as you will be responsible for owning the development of solutions from research to release, start-up to scale-up. You’re able to define, gather and apply strong insights and turn those into a vision for digital products and services.  You’ll be the human-centric glue that binds together business strategy, creative, and technology into a harmonious collaboration, working with multi-disciplinary teams to deliver positive impact for brands, people and their environment.

Located on the Herengracht canal in central Amsterdam, you will have access to our diverse network of specialists by collaborating across our twelve European studios.  You will work in an environment which fosters a meritocratic culture and encourages ownership, and you will be surrounded by some of the brightest minds in their fields.

ROLE REQUIREMENTS

• Develop impactful user strategy and service design deliverables working with AKQA Creative, Product, Strategy and Tech teams.
• Demonstrate excellent knowledge of the design thinking and user centric design approach and the ability to apply them flexibly across a variety of project types.
• Demonstrate excellent knowledge of value proposition definition and setting OKR’s
• Ability to create and collaborate on prototypes of various levels of fidelity to showcase user needs across omni-channel journeys.
• Able to work on existing business propositions to optimize and improve a journey, and/or work to craft brand new business propositions that don’t yet exist in the market.
• Able to interface and lead stakeholder management at varying levels of seniority within a client organization, consulting skills are a benefit.
• Comfortable to present and workshop with clients on a regular basis, in person or remote.
• Able to perform guerilla concept tests with customers and/or use qualitative tools for research
• Experience in your portfolio demonstrating skills across Research, Strategy, IA, Service Design, Prototyping and Testing.
• Experience leading innovation processes including Design Thinking workshops, Google Design Sprints, Business Model and/or Value Proposition canvas.

QUALITIES AND CHARACTERISTICS

• You have an insatiable curiosity and are able to observe and identify patterns, trends and insights.
• You are a hands-on creator of prototypes and/or visually impactful strategic deliverables.
• You are entrepreneurial in your thinking and be a problem solver by nature.
• You embrace challenges and inspire new ways of thinking.
• You are a lateral and creative thinker with the ability to make complex topics understandable.
• You aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves to engage in guerrilla testing and interviews.
• You are passionate about collaboration, open-minded, and experienced in working with people from diverse cultures.
• You have a sharp attention to detail and a drive for excellence.
• 5+ years of experience in a relevant role.
• Fluent English speaker, German speaker high desirable
• A service typically consists of the visible and invisible processes, structures, technology and people that help deliver an experience
• Service designers should be systems thinkers, able to think about the problem/need/service in the wider context of the client’s business and the various users and actors (front-stage and back-stage) environments.
• Able to design the end-to-end journey of a service, enabling the user to achieve what they have set out to do, and enabling the business to deliver the promised service;
• This may include research to create a service blueprint; systems designs; opportunity spotting both within the marketplace but also within the client’s business e.g finding operational efficiencies
• Design and facilitate workshops with client stakeholders to extract necessary insight
• Collaborate with and ‘speak the language of’ all areas of the business including technology, operations, IT, marketing, legal, brand
• Ideate, prototype and find suitable methods to validate service concepts