Service Designer

This is a senior specialist practitioner role – you’ll spend your time on client projects, often deeply immersed in a small number of projects, contributing your expertise and leading more junior specialist practitioners. More senior roles have sales targets. This one does not, but you will play a role in growing client relationships and winning work.

The Role Includes

• With clients and colleagues, design and deliver strategic approaches to projects and problems – defining engagement model, project approach, service design activities, tasks, deliverables, etc. and explain them convincingly to clients and collaborators
• Design and lead:
  • Customer/user research and insight, market research, and stakeholder engagement and evangelism – to uncover and articulate opportunity
  • Design thinking, vision and innovation workshop activities, and co-creation sessions – to visualise and express the vision for the transformed front-stage experience
  • Operational and capability change planning, and roadmap making – to plan the transformed back-stage-and-behind-the-scenes organisation (capabilities, structure, operating model, culture, etc.), and plan and mobilise the activities to deliver and implement it
  • Business-case or case-for-change activities – to size, prioritise and justify the change
• Establish your own relationships with key clients. Contribute to business development by helping to identify and define opportunity with existing clients, and assist with pitches and bids to new and existing clients.
• When leading other Service Designers (or audience researchers, or content designers, or UI/UX designers, etc.), set clear expectations about quality of strategic output. Coach teams and contributors to exceed those expectations, ensuring the resulting strategies are realisable
• Model behaviours that create the best project experience and outcomes for all participants, in high-performing teams. Set and manage clear expectations for these behaviours and coach individuals/teams to exceed them.

Key skills you’ll need to be successful in this role:

• Service design, experience mapping, customer research and testing, workshop design and facilitation, business design, organisation change, system thinking, roadmap creation, horizon-scanning, analysis and consulting
• Forming and proposing early hypotheses, as a starting point to collaborative iteration (happy being publicly wrong too)
• Collaboration – reconciling differences and opposing views; challenging and refining together, seeking and offering feedback, seeking counter-opinions
• Using impactful storytelling and visualisation techniques, backed by data, to explain, evangelise and persuade in formal pressured settings (in writing and presentations) to large senior audiences.

The personal attributes we’d expect for someone to be successful in this role are:

• Confident, articulate and persuasive – clear thinking, crisp argument, summarises well, tells good stories backed with robust detail and data
• Imaginative, innovative, creative, curious – enjoys generating ideas, novel directions, solving complex problems, entering new territory, uncovering, probing, digging into the detail
• Able to have full and frank conversations – sensitive and robust in equal measure
• Ambitious for the quality and impact of the work, and for the performance of the team
• Warm – matches depth of expertise with genuine approachable friendliness and integrity to build high-trust relationships and foster an environment of inclusivity and psychological safety