Service Designer

As a Service Design Manager, you will play a key leadership role in transforming ways of working and be responsible for ensuring we take a user-centred approach to tying together human, digital and physical interactions to create truly differentiated, market-leading experiences for our customers.

Your remit and responsibility within our Service Design team will be to manage, lead and help set strategic direction for Service Design capabilities and initiatives, ensuring that our ways of working and artefacts enable design teams and product squads to collaborate across end-to-end journeys and work at pace to create customer and business value.

Your time will be split between working at a strategic level to deliver value to users and managing a team of Service Designers. You will set direction and assure the quality of Service Design delivery across teams. You’ll work with colleagues across the Global Growth Portfolio and Digital teams and beyond and be part of a team who develop excellent end-to-end journeys for our Global customer audience.

Through research you will identify and prioritise problems that the organisation needs to solve either at strategic or squad level. You will ensure the right teams solve the right problems and lead collaboration with those teams. You will facilitate relevant future thinking activities to push the boundaries of what we are building.

You will demonstrate through outcomes while managing and leading others as part of a strong community of practice. You will be a key consultation point across the team and a proactive member of the department.

Will manage the design of end-to-end services across Global; through individual performance and influence in group settings, managing a library of service design patterns that connect to the Global Design system, demonstrating senior stakeholder management in all aspects of delivery helping us to bridge silos. You will drive teams towards outcomes while managing and leading others as part of a strong community of practice.

Coaching and leadership

• Continue the evolution of the BT Service Design framework, tools and techniques

• Ensuring Digital has the mindset, language, tools, standards and people needed to collaborate across end-to-end journeys and be user-centered

• Ensure the wider business sees value and is excited about a customer-centric approach and seeks service design input and collaboration

• Coach and mentor your team and ensure they have everything they need to do their jobs effectively and deliver customer and business value

Team Organisation

• Define strategy for collaboration and ways of working across E2E journeys and the full business stack

• Evolve the operating model for the cross-functional Squads

• Define strategy for organisational structure, including headcount forecasting and 3rd party vendor management

• Accountable for ensuring the efficient and optimised operation of the Service Design team

Tooling & Ways of Working

• Management of licensing for design and research tools, including procurement and vendor management

• Implement tools, processes and training to effectively democratise user research for Designers and Cross-functional Squads

Practices & Methods

• Responsible for scaling our Service Design practice and ways of working

• Shared ownership and continuous improvement of best practice documentation, templates, methods and Playbook as part of the BT “Digital Way”

Culture & Community

• You’ll be responsible for building and maintaining relationships with your peers across product, engineering and design and across other alliances.

Skills and qualities required for the job   

A spectrum of expertise across the following skills (with a specialism in some areas):

• Advocating for people and user needs in all aspects of design work

• User-centered design and Service design

• Research – User research and personas research

• Facilitation – Workshop planning and facilitation

• Identifying the right problems to solve – Problem framing, assumptions mapping, hypothesis testing

• Mapping – User journeys, service blueprinting,

• Creating differentiated solutions to problems –  ideation, solution hypotheses, measures of success, prioritisation, story documentation, prototyping and testing

• Design Thinking experience through knowledge and application of theory

• Designing inclusive, accessible and sustainable services

• Designing services for multiple user groups with a range of stakeholders

Expected Experience & behaviours

Requires:

• At least 5-10 years of experience as a service designer (or roles with similar skills) with a good amount of that time working on ecommerce experiences.

• At least 3-5 years of experience managing service designers

• Engaging and collaborating with stakeholders and colleagues from other disciplines in a variety of ways, as well as the ability to work autonomously away from their team

• Negotiating design decisions with senior stakeholders

• Making effective decisions using user research and data, in order to improve a service, reduce complexity and generate new ideas

• Explaining design ideas and concepts in a way that other people understand, including visualising, sketching and prototyping

• Reflecting critically and asking difficult questions; thinking holistically about the big picture while working out details and being able to appreciate and articulate the broader implications of a thing

The following qualities: 

• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills with an intrinsic ability to turn complexity into simplicity. You do your best work when you align cross–functional teams to shared outcomes

• You get under the skin of problems. You insist on a deeper understanding of the problems we’re trying to solve before we rush into solution mode

• Lean approach to action; continually finding ways to deliver more value to the customer and the business with less effort.

• Strategic thinking and planning; driving efficient ways of working, looking to make a best-in-class design team and operating model

• Entrepreneurial and flexible approach to activities; adapting behaviours and proactively removing barriers to delivering results. You ask for forgiveness not permission. You are confident in your ideas to improve the way we work and you’re not afraid to try them first and then share them with others