Lead Service Designer - DBT - G7

Location

Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford

About the job

Job summary

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways.   

Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.  

Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements. 

Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.  

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission. The team have been nominated four times in a row for ‘Best Public Sector Employer’ at the Women in Tech awards! 

Job description

As a Lead Service Designer at DBT you will identify gaps and opportunities in existing services as well as look for opportunities to create new ones. Working in a user centred multidisciplinary team alongside researchers, developers, and other designers, you’ll bring a wide view of the landscape as well as be the voice of the user and business. You'll collaborate with product managers and service owners to help understand and communicate the complexities of our services.    

You will create visions, strategies, and roadmaps to help guide teams and stakeholders while documenting holistic user journeys to communicate and help make and understand key decisions. We’re looking for someone who will be able to analyse existing services to understand pain and failure points as well as actively promoting good design rational with the team and to stakeholders to ensure quality outcomes.   

To be effective in this position, you will need to understand the needs of users and stakeholders and be able to communicate this in an engaging way, whether this is by creating prototypes to test an idea and inspire the team and stakeholders or creating design patterns that can be used across our services to ensure consistency and scalability. 

Main responsibilities  

You will: 

• Understand and advocate for user needs, ensuring services are designed to meet them. Lead communication with colleagues across DBT to define user journeys and articulate product visions.
• Engage and manage stakeholder needs, driving the communication of insights and strategies to senior stakeholders and management.
• Track user interactions across boundaries, create user journeys to highlight pain points and improvements, and design systems across multiple services, ensuring simple and evidence-based outcomes.
• Demonstrate expertise in service design, helping others understand its value, and lead evidence-based design direction. Create high-quality deliverables like personas, experience maps, and service blueprints.
• Lead on the analysis of research findings, identify improvement opportunities, and communicate design solutions that address user needs and business outcomes and use prototyping methods to share ideas with real users and encourage collaboration.
• Bring the team and stakeholders along the journey, ensuring feedback is incorporated, and act as an authority on service design, managing, training, and mentoring other designers, leading the capability and promotion of service design within the department and across government.
• Identify cost-saving opportunities while implementing best practice service design, promoting best practice and build a collaborative culture within the Service Design team. 

Person specification

It is essential that you have: 

• Significant experience of hands-on service design with a strong understanding of user needs and designing services to support these needs (Lead Criteria)
• The ability to analyse pain points and the ability to communicate design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes 
• Experience in working in agile cross-functional teams, working with with user researchers and business analysts to inform design outcomes and the ability to coach and mentor junior colleagues on Service Design.
• The ability to develop and manage long-term strategic relationships with stakeholders, identifying where new connections need to be made and with experience in influencing and communicating to a wide range of senior stakeholders on the value of user centricity, your strategies, approaches and decisions. 
• Extensive experience in driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which result successfully with the ability to coach and manage colleagues creating a positive and collaborative working environment.   
• Experience in designing digital and non-digital services which are accessible, usable and based on user needs, using design and strategic thinking to create designs that are outcome focused and solve a whole problem for both users and business stakeholders. 

It is desirable that you have: 

• Experience of designing for public services or large organisations and in technical environments  
• Confidence in collaborating with developers, product managers, policy specialist and service owners  

Technical skills

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

• Service Prototyping
• System Thinking
• Data-Led Design
• Design Communication
• Design Strategically
• Designing Together
• Evidence-Based Design
• Leading Design