Senior Service Designer

This is an exciting opportunity to make real changes for HMRC and our customers through innovation. With a keen interest in service design and innovation, you’ll focus on problem definition and have the freedom to develop new, innovative solutions to business problems through a range of approaches. You’ll develop a deep understanding of user needs and business goals. You’ll take insights from multiple, specialist perspectives to frame problems, and develop ideas.

Proactive and reactive to changing opportunities, you’ll have the skill to interpret and react to small, medium and large-scale challenges, and the vision to identify potential and future opportunities.

By using emerging technology, data, and considering user needs, you’ll develop innovative concepts and solutions. You’ll test the art of the possible by designing proof of concepts to test solutions, working with internal groups, third parties, external suppliers and academia.

You’ll run proof of value exercises to support concepts by demonstrating customer and HMRC impact. You’ll contribute to business cases and make compelling recommendations for future direction, delivering these to senior stakeholders to influence policy and strategy.

The ideal candidate will be an experienced Service Designer with the ability to lead and direct service design in a fast-paced, collaborative, multidisciplinary Innovation Team. You’ll have experience in developing innovative concepts for future services and compellingly presenting these as recommendations to stakeholders and senior leaders. You’ll be comfortable using User Centred Design, reacting to user research, mapping user journeys, prototyping and developing MVPs.

Responsibilities

Your role will include:

• Leading Service Design within the CDIO Innovation Team, providing direction for collaborative teams, mentoring and coaching others and championing collaboration across the wider team
• Be inquisitive and work with user researchers to help plan, analyse and synthesise user research to develop a thorough understanding of user needs, championing user-centred design to create service propositions and testing these with users
• Considering policy implications and organisational direction when designing services and concepts, enabling design-led decision making
• Working with others to identify key stakeholders for innovation projects and concept design, building collaborative relationships across teams and service domains
• Working with Innovation colleagues and subject area experts to design aspirational concepts by mapping as-is journeys, developing to-be journeys and creating new blueprints for services and processes
• Led by user workshops and stakeholder engagement, developing sketches, scenarios, diagrams, maps, and prototypes to develop innovative concepts
• Identifying business problems and recommending solutions by applying appropriate facilitation methods and skills to demonstrate these

Essential skills and expertise for this role:

You will already have experience and understanding of:-

•Collaborating with teams and stakeholders to define the problem that needs to be solved and design services
•Using evidence, data and research to influence design thinking and visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts e.g. creating diagrams and sketches that clearly communicate user journeys, interactions and other behaviours through services
•Significant experience planning and running service design activities, including:

o Creating high level project plans for design, planning and running workshops with stakeholders and end-users
o Leading the analysis and synthesis of outputs to create user journeys and service flows
o Experience using a variety of methods for prototyping and iterating products and end-to-end services with the ability to apply technical knowledge and experience to design workable prototypes with the ability to communicate well with developers
o Experience using design to develop strategy, roadmaps and vision statements, evaluating strategies and policies to ensure that user needs and business requirements are met, understanding business issues and developing new approaches and solutions, considering implications and long-term impacts

•Communicating information effectively to a variety of stakeholders with the ability to make complex and technical information understandable for non-technical audiences
•Agile working and methodology with the ability to apply an agile mindset to all aspects of your work in a fast-paced, evolving environment, using an iterative, flexible approach
•Leading and guiding others with the ability to create a collaborative environment to solve problems, driving teams and setting pace to ensure delivery while managing and mitigating risk
•Maintaining a user focus and putting users first, you understand users, and can identify who they are and what their needs are, translating analysis into user stories, user journeys, design approaches and solutions that meet these needs
•The digital economy and advances in technology in areas such as banking and payments, data sharing, communication, smart contracts and distributed ledger technology, with a good working knowledge of emerging technology, how this is changing user behaviour, and experience of using new technology to improve services

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

• Evidence and context-based design
• Strategic Thinking
• User Focus