Principal Service Designer

As a principal service designer, you’ll be responsible for designing the end-to-end journey of our clients’ services, creating frictionless services and products that delight their customers.

From user research to envisioning, from complex operational requirements to technical legacy challenges, you are very much at home designing and implementing concepts and solutions that infuse empathy, creativity, and strategy helping teams to ideate and innovate towards the project outcomes.

You are a brilliant facilitator, both of the multi-discipline team and stakeholders, bring these parts together to craft solutions. A flexible problem-solver who enjoys working with others to make things happen.

Essential skills:

• Consultant – can reach out effectively across organisational, technical and situational boundaries and provide clear advice and recommendations on potential approaches to meet the outcomes. Strong communicator who can simplify complex, organisational processes, making it understandable to all

• Co-creator – able to facilitate co-creation by building a successful team where everyone involved in the service is represented and contributes to the bigger picture

• Strategic planner – understand the wider organisational objectives, issues, risks and activities. Represent them in any discussions about the service.

• Storyteller – Articulate strategic goals for the service and share the story through artefacts like service blueprints, roadmaps, vision and mission statements.

• Agile team member – you know about agile methodology and can apply an agile mindset to all aspects of your work

• Communicator – you can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them in a way that is clear for both audiences. You know how to manage stakeholder expectations. You can be flexible and you are capable of proactive and reactive communication. You know how to facilitate difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.

• Digital perspective – can drive a digital first outcome while designing for offline, balancing the importance of assisted digital and an delvering an accessible service.

• Evidence-driven – you are a strong believer in context-based design, you can visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and make disciplined decisions based on available information and research evidence. You know how to move from analysis to synthesis and/or design intent.

Can deliver a cross-discipline approach including:

• User research – ability to define research goals according to service needs. Comfortable undertaking observation, shadowing or similar with a view to understanding user needs and behaviours.

• Business architecture – conduct analysis and documentation of “as is” processes, and putting those processes against a map of the overall service. Through to defining a new service architecture i.e. the front-stage and back-stage elements that make up a service.

• User experience – defining the service flows and articulating various service aspects through process and ecosystem maps to working closely with other designers to create concepts of the new service experience

• Data modelling – defining the information that is relevant to support the service, working closely with technologists to articulate clearly the relationship between different types of information required of the service – both for organisation and user needs.

Experience you can demonstrate:

Beyond demonstrating the above essential skills, can show:

• Demonstrable experience leading service design across key phases of digital projects e.g. Discovery, Alpha & MVS

• Case studies demonstrating experience across complex digital projects where service design was a key component of delivery

• Clear experience working within the GDS delivery model for UK Government service design (for Gov-focused role)

• Clear experience working with commercial clients (ideally in ecommerce) delivering service design (for commercial-focused role)

• Ability to analyse failure within services and identify root causes for that failure

• Clear experience working closely with other digital project team roles (from business analysts to researchers to technical architects) and pulling the best from the team to recommend a future ready new service