Lead Service Designer

DWP Digital and Transformation Group offers fulfilling careers for people who want to use their skills to make a genuine difference to society. We’re part of the UK’s biggest government department, supporting millions of people every day.

We deliver products, services, support and payments to people at key times in their lives. Working Age Services is one of the highest profile digital transformation programmes in the world.

Our products and services include a set of new digital tools called the Work Hub, designed to help citizens understand their skills, explore different job roles and careers, find courses to help fill skills gaps, gain work experience, apply for jobs and discover opportunities to progress their careers.

We are also responsible for Universal Credit and other benefit payment systems which are considered national critical infrastructure for over 8 million people in receipt of benefits.

We’re looking for Lead Service Designers who can help the Working Age Services design teams and the wider department to actively seek out, explore and understand key problem statements and collaborate to hypothesise and rapidly test different approaches to deliver outcomes for the people using our services.

We are looking for confident and inquisitive candidates with great facilitation skills who can help bring teams and stakeholders together, provide frameworks and common languages to help us collectively push boundaries and drive new experiences and make use of new technology to help solve problems and improve outcomes for our customers.

We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates who have worked with policy and strategy teams as a large part of this role will be maturing our approach to new and emerging policy.

You’ll be working alongside other user centred design professionals who are committed to deliver the best possible outcomes for all our users and ensuring everything we design is accessible to everyone.

You’ll join a highly supportive community, sharing your expertise, and learning new skills from those around you. As a Lead Service Designer, you will play a critical role in being a mentor and role model for the wider Service Design team.

As a Lead Service Designer you will lead and drive the exploration and understanding of emerging policy and business strategy for Working Age Services working closely with the Lead Product Managers and Product Strategy team to mature and adapt the service to meet the needs of all the people who use our services.

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 Working Age Services and other 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 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.