Senior Service Designer

The Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology is in the middle of a transformation worth joining. We’re building cross-functional pod teams that partner directly with agencies to design, deliver, and continuously improve services that work for Coloradans. Good government depends on technology that works, and OIT exists to make that true for every Coloradan. The State of Colorado is seeking a Senior Service Designer to help build the next generation of public services. We’re looking for people who want to do the best work of their careers in the service of the public.

This role is scoped to service design, not UI/UX or visual design. The Service Designer conducts user research with real constituents and staff, maps current and future state services and processes spanning both digital and non-digital channels, and produces the artifacts that become the foundation for the Product Manager’s backlog. The work happens upstream of solutions, not alongside them.

What you’ll do:

• Plan and conduct qualitative interviews, contextual inquiry, and usability testing with constituents and agency staff.

• Organize and analyze research findings into coherent, decision-enabling insights rather than raw data dumps.

• Produce journey maps, service blueprints, and current/future state diagrams to a professional standard.

• Map current and future state services spanning both digital and non-digital channels.

• Create design artifacts that are clear to non-designers and can be used immediately by Product Managers and Delivery Engineers.

• Define problem spaces from user evidence before any solution is proposed.

• Translate research findings into persona definitions, user stories, and backlog inputs for the agile development pod.

• Run workshops with agency staff that surface real process pain points and service gaps.

• Collaborate with the Product Manager to align research findings with mission priorities.

• Create low-fidelity prototypes of a service (such as new scripts, task flows, or physical environment mockups) to test with users before full-scale implementation.

• Run iterative tests on proposed solutions—not just research on the problem space—to validate that a design actually solves the identified issues.

• Identify how the success of a service will be measured at scale (e.g., reduced call volume, increased completion rates, or cost savings).

• Leverage web analytics, CRM data, or survey statistics to provide a broader context for qualitative findings.

• Assist the pod team and agency leadership with the planning and timing of service improvements to ensure they are operationally feasible.

• Consider how AI, automation, and emerging technology may affect the services being designed, identifying opportunities and risks from a constituent experience perspective and surfacing findings to the pod and agency leadership.

What you bring:

• Knowledge of user research methods, including qualitative interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, survey design, and analysis of findings for a non-research audience.

• Knowledge of service design methods, including service blueprinting, journey mapping, current/future state process mapping, and stakeholder ecosystem mapping.

• Knowledge of, or the ability to quickly understand, how state agencies deliver services to constituents across digital and non-digital channels, the constraints they operate under, and where service failures commonly occur.

• Knowledge of Agile and product development sufficient to translate research findings into user stories, personas, and backlog inputs.

• Understanding of how varied populations interact with government services, with specific consideration for individuals requiring language assistance, those with disabilities, and people facing digital limitations.

• Ability to define a problem space from user evidence before any solution is proposed.

• Ability to build trust with constituents and frontline workers quickly enough to get honest, usable research.

• Ability to resist pressure to skip discovery and jump to solutions. Hold space for research even when stakeholders already think they know the answer.

• Ability to translate constituent and staff experience into language that motivates action from agency leadership and IT teams.

• Ability to work comfortably in ambiguous, early-stage problem spaces without a defined product or system to react to.

• Ability to scope research appropriately by producing just enough artifact to enable the next decision, not exhaustive documentation for its own sake.

• Ability to operate in a variable capacity role, recognizing that work is most intensive in discovery phases.

This is a skills-based job announcement. The required minimum qualifications and/or education (if substituting for the proven experience, knowledge, and skills), are as follows:

Minimum Qualifications:

• A minimum of five (5) years of experience conducting user research, which includes working in or leading cross-functional teams using iterative, user-centered methods.

• A track record of working across disciplines — design, engineering, policy, or operations — to ship things that work for real people.

Substitutions:

• Additional appropriate education will substitute for the required experience on a year-for-year basis, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.

• Training or Certification related to the work assigned to the position will be assigned credit towards substitution for experience and/or education, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.

• If the minimum qualifications include a degree requirement, additional appropriate paid or unpaid experience will substitute for the required education on a year-for-year basis.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced certification or structured training in Service Design, Human-Centered Design (HCD), or specialized civic tech frameworks (e.g., U.S. Digital Service or 18F design methodologies).

• Experience working within a digital service agency or a government-adjacent technology firm, successfully translating mission-driven policy goals into actionable product backlogs.

• Experience mapping and designing for complex organizational ecosystems, including navigating multi-agency governance, policy constraints, or legacy operational structures to improve service delivery.

• Background in User-Centered Design (UCD).