Lead Service Designer

As a Lead Service Designer at Zone, you will play a strategic role across all stages of the process and delivery of our service design work, especially within our public sector portfolio. From championing service user needs and bridging them to government policy and regulatory frameworks, to understand and map the service context (e.g. stakeholders, partners, suppliers, ecosystems, physical infrastructure, etc.), formulate outcome-oriented hypotheses and concepts, and articulate service value propositions in multi-channel experiences across multiple touch-points.

Lead Service Designers play a pivotal role in ensuring that the services brought to fruition are crafted to the highest standard, drive value, and meet and balance the needs of the people who use them and the businesses that deliver them.

Lead Service Designers also help articulate any organisational change that is required to support the delivery of the service effectively in the context of organisational capabilities (existing and new) and strategy. As a result, Lead Service Designers will be also involved in crafting any relevant capability that will help employees deliver the service (e.g. support and communication channels and touch-points).

You will work collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams across various clients, from those attempting to disrupt the market to those driving optimisation and innovation across existing ones.

Zone’s designers care deeply about working closely with our clients to get to the heart of the problem they are looking to solve. We are passionate about using modern Agile practices and exercises to deliver transformative solutions at pace and scale.

This job is for you if you are:

• Passionate about mapping, orchestrating and fine-tuning the relationships and interactions of the several users, actors, systems, processes and capabilities involved in the service.
• Proficient in planning and organising the way those peoples and components contribute to the delivery of the service proposition.
• An engaging storyteller capable of synthesising and simplifying the service complexity in simple, visual, and flexible narratives for several stakeholders with different informational needs.
• A proactive and persuasive expert able to navigate, engage with and align complex and disjointed organisational silos towards a common vision.
• An inquisitive thinker who is not afraid to flag knowledge gaps, surface misalignment between user and business needs, challenge assumptions and policy with evidence or triangulating multiple sources of truth.
• Ready to apply your talents and strategic thinking across a wide range of projects and government sectors, as part of medium to large multidisciplinary teams, partnering with business analysts, engineers, user researchers, data specialists to bring desirable solutions to market. Connecting with real users and other service actors to gather feedback and insights to inform the work, team, and clients.
• Willing to develop your craft and skills with like-minded individuals from a broad spectrum of design disciplines and being involved across all stages of the service development process, from concept ideation through to delivery.

To do this, our Lead Service Designers:

• Are methodical, systemic and holistic thinkers, capable of imaging several service layers through multiple lenses, and beyond organisational boundaries.
• Are experts of all facets of human-centred design and Design Thinking principles and methodologies, which enables them to create intuitive and inclusive services that solve real whole problems for users and manage any unknowns, chaos and complexity that can arise at any point in the service design lifecycle.
• Initiate and lead collaboratively with their teams to expose and map the service context and then unpack problem spaces, identify critical factors, identify insights and prioritise value-driving opportunities to deliver business and customer value while mitigating any foreseeable impact on other stakeholders.
• Comfortable flexing their entrepreneurial skills and strategic thinking to help the agency grow its business and capabilities.
• Understand complex regulatory frameworks and the client’s organisational dynamics and translate or extend the service proposition across digital and non-digital channels.
• Play a leading role in client workshops to drive alignment, clarity and shared understanding.
• Take a lead to develop ideas & validation of hypotheses and concepts through ideation, research and testing activities.
• Provide the necessary critique to map journeys, flows, interactions and dependencies above and below the service’s line of visibility.
• Provide effective onboarding, training and coaching to less senior team members, and help them progress in their career development or operate efficiently in complex organisations.

Requirements:

Your experience includes:

• A portfolio presenting a few case studies covering the whole service design lifecycle (from discovery to Beta and beyond) with actual artefacts that can be presented in depth during the interview.
• Working for highly regulated public and commercial sectors.
• Experience in leading the design within multi-disciplinary agile service teams (incl. content and interaction designers, business analysts, researchers, developers and subject matter experts)
• Clear evidence of how you solved whole real for user needs through an evidenced based design
• Proven and practical experience in leading, or playing a senior role in the definition or delivery of user-centred services.

• Proven and practical experience in formulating and developing service value propositions, leverage existing or new capabilities to fulfil those propositions, or mitigate constraints with researchers, business analysts, solution architects, service owners, delivery leads and other designers.
• Well informed design opinions based on research, data and insights.
• Guiding and mentoring members of your team to support their individual progression.