Senior Service Designer

At Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities, ours is the important responsibility of transforming New Zealand’s housing choices, outcomes and the entire housing sector by creating homes and communities that allow New Zealanders to thrive.

What is exciting about working for Kāinga Ora is getting the chance to make a real and positive impact on New Zealanders’ lives. With skills, planning and purposeful action, our people are creating the homes and neighbourhoods that will build Aotearoa’s future.

We are passionate about transforming New Zealand for the better. That includes being a trusted partner for Māori and iwi, protecting and enabling their rights, interests and aspirations under the guidance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Ko tā mātou mahi -  Our Role

We are currently looking for multiple Senior Service Designers to understand and advocate for the voice of the customer and the customer experience in a wide range of project based work.   We define customers as the end user of the product or service, this could be Tenants, frontline staff or staff in other business areas.  It is our service designers who bring to light customer insights and advocate for the voice of the customer during the discovery, design and implementation of new or improved services/products.  As a member of our Business Analysis & Service Design team you will be supported to collate known customer insights through existing channels, identify and undertake design research as needed and ensure these insights and the impact on the customer experience is articulated and captured in project decisions.

As a senior designer your experience across projects that deliver people, process or technology changes ensures you are confident to lead and influence projects on service design tools and techniques that are fit for purpose. Ensuring the project team understand the approach and the value it will provide. The Senior Service Designer will work with Service Designers, partners, teams and projects to build confidence and embed capability in the application of Service Design and human centered approaches.

Ngā pūmanawatanga ōu – What you will bring

• Confidence and passion to advocate for the people and their needs within the service (customer and employee needs) throughout the project, and to communicate and document these needs in a format that is visible, clear and can be traced to solutions.
• 4 or more years of proven experience of design approaches (including human-centred design, service design, design thinking, systems thinking) implemented in various sectors.
• In-depth knowledge and experience of service design and/or other design disciplines (ie. Systems Design, Business Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Interaction Design).
• Proven experience working collaboratively with multiple stakeholders, customers and disciplines with competing needs and the confidence to lead engaging co-design workshops.
• Ability to communicate effectively and quickly.
• Experience in conducting empathy interviews and customer research and turning customer and business insights and data into actionable insights to inform the design and delivery business solutions that align with our strategic intent and customer and business needs.
• A desire to contribute to the broader success of a team by playing a mentoring and coaching role to other team members, actively engaging and leading our Centre of Excellence and peer review process.
• Experience testing designs through an iterative testing/rapid prototyping and learning.
• Proven ability to work within a collaborative team that takes an insights-driven approach to developing design outcomes
• Experience with concept, ideation, and iterative prototyping
• Ability to build and maintain strong working relationships with colleagues, partners and key stakeholders