Lead Service Designer

This is the job

Join us in London as a Lead Service Designer in the Digital team. Reporting directly to the Head of Experience Design, in this role you will be responsible for the design of end-to-end service experiences for our customers, redesigning how these services are delivered.

As Lead Service Designer you will be an expert practitioner. You will be hands on in this role, whilst also being comfortable taking a lead role in facilitating engagement with a wide range of stakeholders as well as mentoring and coaching others.

You will be well versed in applying a range of human-centred design methods to solve complex problems and facilitating cross-functional teams to design new services. You’ll be a seasoned facilitator, able to effectively collaborate to engage both customers and service development teams, helping them understand their services from a customer point of view and how to optimise business processes to deliver holistic and meaningful improvements that effective deliver on customer and business outcomes.

You’ll have a background in qualitative and quantitative research and have a strong grasp of how to use data to understand the end-to-end service experience. You’ll enjoy storytelling and facilitating and be able to effectively communicate at all levels through blueprinting, journey mapping, prototyping and a range of relevant methodologies to bring people along the journey.

In addition, you will be working closely with product teams to ensure digital elements of the experience support the holistic end-to-end service experience.

Your role is strategically important, influencing the way we work to design services end-to-end, surface-to-core, across the organisation. Your influence will be key to the success of our strategy to Make Britain’s Driving Life Better. You will be expected to work closely with senior stakeholders such as the Head of Brand, Head of Product, Tech Leads and Solution Architects to ensure creative and experiential alignment across products, channels and technology.

What will I be doing?

• Inspire colleagues, up to Director and Executive level, about the role of Service Design and the value it brings across the organisation to our customers and to the business
• Set the standard for Service Design at the AA, educating and coaching teams in the value a service design approach brings to our overall service development
• Work closely with Service Development teams, Content Strategists, Insights teams and Product Teams to ensure alignment on the end-to-end service experience
• Facilitate human-centred design of services end-to-end, surface to core, with a range of stakeholders
• Set direction, assure the quality of service design acro
• • Set direction, assure the quality of service design across teams and lead the design of multiple or highly complex services
  • Ensure that teams take a user-centred, evidence-based approach to service design and development.
  • Develop and assure excellent service design practice and guidance across the organisation
  • Mentor other members of staff in service design approaches and help raise the influence of human-centred design as part of the wider CX team
  • Run and lead design workshops
  • Research, map, prototype and test end-to-end service journeys ensuring we put the customer at the heart of service design and development.
  • Stay abreast of market, technological and industry trends, tools and techniques to inform decision-making

  What do I need?

  Capability, Knowledge and Experience:

  • Proven record of leading Service Design, with experience working client-side for a large organisation
  • Extensive experience in a Service Design role, with a solid background in human-centred design and design thinking
  • Experience as a facilitator, with demonstrable experience applying a range of methods from Design Thinking to Design Sprints
  • Solid understanding of data analytics and other quantitative research tools and techniques
  • Strong visualisation skills, able to articulate the end-to-end service experience for customers and the back-stage people, processes and systems that support this to wide range of stakeholders
  • Experience prototyping and testing online and offline experiences
  • Experience of coaching and mentoring colleagues
  • Skilled user of common design and collaboration software such as Miro, Axure, Sketch, Zeplin, Invision
  • Expertise in qualitative and quantitative design research methods
  • Able to understand, analyse and use data to guide design decisions

  Education and Qualifications:

  • University degree desirable

  Personal Characteristics:

  • Self-starter that takes the initiative to generate new ideas, bring people together and improve ways of working
  • Excellent communicator, driving valuable conversations with technical and non-technical colleagues across the business
  • Comfortable working at a strategic and conceptual level
  • Genuine interest in people, keen to lead and develop a team, helping them to achieve their goals
  • Passionate about user-centred design, and the impact it can have on people’s lives
  • Reflects and exhibits the AA Brand Values – Courtesy, Care, Expertise, Dynamism and Collaboration