Lead Service Designer

Are you passionate about designing services that support millions across the UK?

Interested in driving some of the country’s most significant transformational changes?

If so, this could be the role for you!

At DWP Digital & Transformation, we offer meaningful careers for those who want to use their skills to improve lives. As part of the UK’s largest government department, we deliver vital services, support and payments to people at key moments.

We’re looking for a Lead Service Designer to help shape the future of DWP services. You’ll work with design teams and stakeholders to explore problems, test ideas and deliver better outcomes for users.

We’re seeking confident facilitators who can unite teams, provide clarity, and foster collaboration. Experience of working with policy and strategy teams is especially valuable.

You’ll join a supportive community of user-centred design professionals, committed to accessibility and excellence. As a Lead Service Designer, you’ll also mentor others and help grow our service design capability.

As a Lead Service Designer, you’ll shape the future of DWP services by aligning emerging policy and business strategy with user needs, evolving services to better support millions of users.

You’ll champion collaboration across digital, policy, legal and other teams, ensuring services are designed with people at the heart.

You’ll be a confident facilitator and expert practitioner, advocating for user-centred design and driving improvements that deliver real outcomes.

What you’ll do:

• Lead service design, aligning user needs with policy, service and product strategy.
• Facilitate collaboration across departments to define and deliver effective user journeys.
• Engage senior stakeholders and influence decision-making at departmental level.
• Produce high-quality design outputs including journey maps, experience maps, service blueprints and user flows.
• Analyse research and data to identify pain points and improvement opportunities.
• Use prototyping to test ideas and communicate concepts with users.
• Promote best practice and build a strong, open design culture across the Department.
• Mentor designers and support capability building within the service design community.
• Contribute to recruitment and development of the DWP Digital design team.

This is a leadership role where you’ll set direction, guide teams and help embed service design across the organisation. If you’re passionate about designing services that truly meet people’s needs, we’d love to hear from you.

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 leading the design of end-to-end, front-to-back services which solve complex problems.
• Provide expertise and best-practice at programme level to design evidence-based services that meet user needs, colleague needs and organisation objectives, and achieve service outcomes.
• Be comfortable communicating to a wide range of colleagues, advocating for user centricity, and influencing senior stakeholders on the value of service design, your strategies, approaches and decisions.
• Lead on the creation and maintenance of a positive and collaborative working environment within your organisation, to enable the conditions for service design.