Lead Service Designer

We are looking for people with a clear vision for delivering excellent and inclusive services who have experience of delivering transformational results and excellent user experiences, and are able to influence colleagues across services to make effective use of data and service design. Working as part of an effective, multidisciplinary team, you will need to lead and inspire a team of service designers to work closely with user researchers and data analysts in order to put user needs at the heart of all decision making.

You will coordinate service design activities across a wide range of projects, providing oversight and support as well as expert advice on methodology, approaches, tools, quality and standards.

It is an exciting opportunity to champion the voice of the customer/ user, leading customer/ user-centred design across the Council’s services and improving the customer experience to provide ‘right first time’ solutions for Hackney customers.

Key accountabilities

• Manage a Community of Practice, enabling service designers to work as part of a multidisciplinary team and developing them to adopt user-centered practices and embed them into their agile workflow
• Understand organizational goals and challenges, aligning research activities to the Mayor’s priorities, corporate objectives, and the Customer Experience Roadmap
• Ensure delivery of high-quality service design to inform a high-quality user experience – leading to identifying, understanding, and validating (through prototyping) user needs for new and amended service
• Explain user needs to senior leaders, and act as a persuasive advocate for those needs both within the product and wider teams.

Skills and Experience

• An expert practitioner who can influence stakeholders, and lead teams to collaborate with services to design and improve end-to-end journeys for residents.
• Proven ability to use a wide range of service design methods and Agile techniques to achieve demonstrable results to improve the customer experience and encourage adoption of these across the organization
• Well versed in communicating and engaging with a wide range of stakeholders
• Able to make decisions through the analysis of relevant information and risk assessment that demonstrate commitment to the Council’s vision for a better Hackney.