Lead Service Designer

We’re looking for experienced Service Designers who can work with minimal support while influencing and mentoring others. Will you be able to help set the right direction and embed good practice within our teams?

 As a Lead Service Designer at DBT you will identify gaps and opportunities in existing services as well as look for opportunities to create new ones. Working in a user centred multidisciplinary team alongside researchers, developers, and other designers, you’ll bring a wide view of the landscape as well as be the voice of the user and business. You’ll collaborate with product managers and service owners to help understand and communicate the complexities of our services.

You will create visions, strategies, and roadmaps to help guide teams and stakeholders while documenting holistic user journeys to communicate and help make/understand key decisions. We’re looking for someone who will be able to analyse existing services to understand pain and failure points as well as actively promoting good design rational with the team and to stakeholders to ensure quality outcomes.

To be effective in this position, you will need to understand the needs of users and stakeholders and be able to communicate this in an engaging way, whether this is by creating prototypes to test an idea and inspire the team and stakeholders or creating design patterns that can be used across our services to ensure consistency and scalability.

This role is based in the newly created Department for Business and Trade, which brings together the business focused functions of the former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Department for International Trade (DIT). Our joint expertise in trade and business provides us with a unique opportunity to unleash the power of UK businesses, reform regulation to reduce burdens and unlock post-Brexit freedoms.

This role is available in seven UK locations and can only be worked from within the UK and not overseas. Most DBT employees will be working a hybrid pattern, spending 2-3 days a week (pro rata) in the office on average. Changes to these working arrangements are available in certain circumstances but must be agreed with the vacancy manager and in line with the requirements of the role. Travel to your primary office location will not be paid for by DBT, but costs for travel to an office which is not your main location will be covered.

Find out about life at DBT, our benefits and meet the team by watching our recruitment video, visiting our website or reading our blog!

In this role you will:

• Align communication with colleagues to define user journeys and articulate the vision for products and services.
• Identify opportunities for cost reduction and improvement within existing services.
• Understand user needs and track interactions across departmental and organisational boundaries.
• Create as is user journeys, highlighting pain points, dependencies, areas for improvements, and hypotheses to test.
• Create service prototypes to test ideas and assumptions and meaningful metrics to translate data into insights.
• Design systems across multiple services and touch points while delivering the simplest of outcomes based on evidence.
• Bring both the team and stakeholders along the journey with you to ensure feedback is taken onboard and decisions sense checked.
• Act as an authority on service design, managing, training and mentoring other designers and contribute to the design community within DBT and across government.

Essential Skills and Experience

You will need to have demonstrable skills and experience of:

• Understanding user needs and designing services to support these.
• Analysing pain points and communicating design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• Working with user researchers and business analysts to inform design outcomes.
• Senior stakeholder management.
• Driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which result successfully.
• Designing digital and non-digital services which are accessible, usable, and based on user needs.
• Understanding the bigger picture, using design and strategic thinking to create designs that are outcome focused and solve a whole problem for both users and business stakeholders.

Desirable Skills and Experience

These are not necessary but would be ideal if you have:

• A background in design across multiple sectors.
• Experience of designing for public services or large organisations and in technical environments.
• Confidence in collaborating with developers, product managers, policy specialist and service owners.