Lead AI Service Designer

The DESNZ Change & Transformation Directorate is shaping what it means to be a truly consumer-focused department, reimagining our operating model, organisational capabilities, systems, processes and structures to meet both immediate and long-term goals. A key part of that transformation is harnessing the power of AI. The AI Product Development Team is a new, discovery-led product team within the Change & Transformation Directorate. We take the department’s highest-value AI ideas and shape them into well-understood problems and well-designed solutions, then direct the specialist capacity needed to build them.

• Run product discovery on everything the team takes on, understanding the problem and the users before the team commits to a solution: who the users are, what they are actually trying to do, and what is getting in the way.
• Turn ideas into structured, testable use cases with clear problem statements, barriers and data requirements.
• Map the end-to-end journeys and design the service around them, covering the as-is and to-be business process as well as the user journey.
• Elicit requirements from users and business owners, and test ideas before the team decides what or whether to build, using prototypes, journey walkthroughs and research with real users.
• Set the accessibility, inclusion and user-need standards the team designs to.
• Commission and quality-assure any additional design or research capacity.
• Act as the voice of the user in the team’s investment and prioritisation advice to the DESNZ Data & AI Committee, and in handover to the business owners who adopt what we build.

Essential Criteria

• Significant experience of user-centred design in a large, complex organisation, spanning both user research and service design.
• Experience of designing and delivering inclusive research with a range of users and across different methods, and the judgement to choose the right method for the question being asked.
• Experience of mapping and designing end-to-end journeys, covering business process as well as user journey, and of balancing user needs against business, operational and technical constraints.
• Experience of turning ambiguous ideas into structured, testable problem statements, requirements and measures of success.
• Able to create actionable, evidence-based insight and communicate it clearly and confidently to senior stakeholders.
• Able to navigate a complex stakeholder landscape and gain support for research plans, findings and ways of working.
• Experience of working in a multidisciplinary team, and of commissioning or quality-assuring design and research delivered by others.
• A demonstrable commitment to accessible, inclusive and equitable design.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience of discovery on AI or data-enabled products, including recognising where AI is not the right answer.
• Familiarity with the Government Service Standard and experience of government service assessments.
• Experience of working with linked administrative or personal data and the information governance constraints that come with it.
• Experience of working in an agile environment with complexity, uncertainty and organisational constraints.

We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing
• Working Together

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Evidence-based design (Practitioner)
• User Research Methods (Practitioner)
• Describe a piece of discovery you led. Set out how you chose your research methods for the problem, how you analysed and synthesised what you found, and how that evidence changed the design or the decision about what to build.

We only ask for evidence of these technical skills on your application form:

• Describe a piece of discovery you led. Set out how you chose your research methods for the problem, how you analysed and synthesised what you found, and how that evidence changed the design or the decision about what to build.