Lead Service Designer

As a Lead Service Designer, you will lead and drive the exploration and understanding of emerging business strategy and the channels we use- working closely with Product Managers, Architects and other Service Designers to mature and adapt our services to meet the needs of all the people who use them.

You will be as passionate about people as you are about service design, championing and leading collaboration between teams spanning digital, policy, legal and others to define, design and deliver a great service.

As a Lead Service Designer, you are an expert practitioner. You have a proven track record of representing and advocating for user-centred design even where it’s not present but should be. You will have excellent workshop facilitation and stakeholder skills to engage with colleagues from across the Department.

You will have proven experience in driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted in successful service outcomes. You understand user needs and business or policy goals and can support strategy and decision making.

You will set direction to define and then implement good practice and make sure that useful guidance, tools and patterns are available across services and teams to solve recurring problems for users. You will define and initiate work to designers so they can visualise whole services, both end to end and front to back, across business areas or departments in order to reduce or remove issues and problems.

Role and Responsibilities

• Understand user needs and help others to do understand them too, so that collectively we can design services to support those needs.
• Align and lead the communication with Lead Product Managers and policy colleagues to define the user journey and articulate the vision for products and services.
• Engage and manage stakeholder needs across different areas with a focus on heading discussions at senior departmental level.
• Demonstrate strong working knowledge of service design in practice as a recognised industry expert and help others to understand its value for both service users and in helping the department to meet its business objectives.
• Lead design direction based on evidence.
• Drive the creation of high-quality service design deliverables, including personas, experience maps, insights packs, user flow maps, and service blueprints.
• Analyse research findings, data, insight gathering, critical thinking and concept generation.
• Understand as-is service design and identify improvement opportunities.
• Analyse pain points within services and communicate and share design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• Drive the communication of insights and stories around the strategy and concepts being designed to senior stakeholders and management.
• Use prototyping methods to communicate and share ideas and concepts with real users to encourage collaboration and iterative processes.
• Lead the adoption of best practice and build a strong open and collaborative culture within the department and feed into the design community.
• Analyse and identify cost saving opportunities whilst implementing best practice service design.
• Define the service design approach and key items on the design agenda, working to implement best practice.
• Actively provide support and mentor team members whilst developing appropriate training to support designers.
• Lead the capability and promote service design in and beyond the Department.
• Support recruitment for the DWP User Centred Design community.

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:

• Lead criterion: Have significant experience of hands-on service design.*
• Provide leadership and expertise at program level to develop end-to-end, front-to-back services using wider Government principles and evidence that meet citizen and colleague needs as well as department objectives.
• Be comfortable influencing and communicating to a wide range of senior and other stakeholders on the value of user centricity, your strategies, approaches and decisions.
• Lead on the creation and maintenance of a positive and collaborative working environment.