Principal Service Designer

The role at a glance

We are looking for an exceptional practitioner in the field of service design to join our creative studio. You will be responsible for helping organisations identify opportunities and deliver compelling, evidence based, human-centred services.

You have a passion for understanding users as well as client organisations and thrive in complex environments. You believe that great end-to-end customer experiences need to be useful and usable, but that their success heavily depends on the back-stage elements that enable them. You have a strong understanding of human centred design and involve the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. You have experience of working with and advising senior leaders.

You will work alongside leaders in the experience design field, in a supportive environment, where you will thrive and grow, as well as mentor and manage more junior practitioners. Our Principal Service Designers are also encouraged to share their experiences and methods with peers in and outside the business.

Role and responsibilities

As a practitioner

• Working from a customer perspective; understanding or envisioning a full end-to-end service, including how the service operates and across digital and non-digital channels.
• Managing stakeholders; influencing and shaping stakeholders’ objectives. Working with senior leaders to support a future vision and priorities for a service transformation or new service development.
• Vision; big picture thinking. Working backwards from an ideal future scenario.
• Integrate efforts across teams into coherent customer journeys — connecting all actors responsible for delivering the service.
• Facilitation and co-creation, coming up with solutions that will work across channels, departments and roles.
• Designing service blueprints (as-is and to-be states); end-to-end inclusive of the customer experience, but also the activities of the behind-the-scenes staff and systems that deliver the service; taking into account things that happen before and after the primary experience, looking at upstream causes and downstream effects.
• Organisational change; overseeing and enabling the change required to deliver a new or improved service.
• Continuous service improvement; challenging how things work and identifying further opportunities for service improvement across all parts of a service inclusive of systems, processes and end-user experience.
• Creating and reusing consistent service patterns to support how a service functions and can operate more effectively.
• Shape, evangelise and espouse Foolproof’s design philosophy and practice, internally and externally.
• Support the costing and planning activity of projects, report on the status of such deliverables to the programme management team and notify them of any risks.
• Support the wider sales team by identifying business opportunities, leading pitches, and generating ideas and suggestions for prospective work.

As a manager and mentor

• Line management of various team members; setting and measuring their performance during appraisals and throughout the year.
• Organising regular meetings with your direct reports to discuss and assess their work.
• Providing recommendations for promotion, salary reviews, and bonuses within your team to your line manager when necessary.
• Sharing project stories and experiences with the wider business, providing critique and direction to your peers and team members.
• Contribute to company blog posts, social media, white papers, as well as attending or speaking at industry conferences.
• Challenging yourself and others to think creatively and improving the standard of our work by making recommendations for training and development.
• Lead by example and uphold the company’s leadership values at all times.

Essential qualities

• A creative, inquisitive mindset.
• An insistence on following human-centred design principles.
• Excellent diplomacy and communication skills.
• Fastidious attention to detail.
• An entrepreneurial spirit.
• Collaborative, whilst taking responsibility for your work.

Experience

• Leading expert in the field of service design with significant industry experience.
• Have significant experience of working strategically on end to end services that exist to fulfil customer goals.
• Have significant experience of making design processes work effectively, influencing working practices and culture to support this.
• Have significant experience of planning, conducting and communicating user research as part of a human-centres design process.
• Have significant experience of explaining design decisions and communicating ideas in a way that other people understand.
• Demonstrating senior client management from sales, and project kick off through to service delivery.
• Have experience of working in an agile environment; working in complex environments, both with teams and senior stakeholders.
• Have experience facilitating workshops and leading meetings. Have proven ability to collaborate successfully with cross-functional peers and teams to develop concepts and services.
• Have experience of coaching others; both through your individual performance and how you influence others in group settings.
• Have transitioned from doer to leader, understanding the broader business and customer context for your work.
• Have mature people and leadership skills.