Principal Designer - Service Design

Principal Designer – Service Design

Up to £75,000 plus excellent benefits (Work Level 4)

Manchester city centre (hybrid working - splitting your time between home and the office)

We’re looking for a Principal Service Designer to join us in Manchester and lead a team focusing on discovery opportunities across the Co-op. In this role, you’ll guide our Service Design community and be responsible for the design and successful implementation of our service design strategy across our business areas, while also playing a key role in our Design Leadership team. We’ll look to you to work closely with our Heads of Design and your other Principal Designer colleagues, and champion the value of effective service design across the wider business.

What you’ll do

• Lead customer-centric approaches to business problems through discovery activities and develop new business opportunities within Co-op
• Be responsible for defining the strategy and direction of service design at Co-op
• Define service design standards and processes, and make sure these are followed appropriately across our teams
• Lead teams across domain to identify and explore opportunities to increase the value impact of service design across multiple business areas
• Use your service design expertise to influence our wider business strategies
• Support the design teams to build community, shared practices and knowledge across teams 
• Collaborate with our delivery and engineering leadership to continuously improve the ways our product teams work together
• Encourage and support our service design community to share their knowledge and experience across the wider business
• Co-ordinate the allocation of colleagues across our user research teams to make sure they have everything they need to successfully deliver on tasks and projects
• Line-manage 3 to 6 of our Lead Designer colleagues, supporting them to effectively manage their own teams

This role would suit people who have

• Significant experience within a Service Design role
• Senior management experience, with the ability to lead teams of 4 or more people
• An expert understanding of service design standards, principles, and methods
• Good communication skills, with the ability to translate complex information for a non-technical audience
• Good relationship-building skills, with the ability to influence and challenge people inclusively

Why Co-op?

If you’ve got the skills and experience, we’re looking for, we can offer you a competitive salary and great benefits package which includes 30% off Co-op branded products in our food stores (as well as other discounts on Co-op products and services). You’ll also get:

• Private healthcare
• A company car or £6,000 car allowance
• An annual bonus (based on personal and business performance)
• 28 days holiday (rising to 32 with service) plus bank holidays
• A pension with up to 10% employer contributions
• Access to a subsidised onsite gym (at our Manchester HQ)
• Coaching and training to support your career development
• Wagestream – a money management app that gives you access to a percentage of your pay as you earn it
• YuLife – an app that rewards you for exercising with discounts and vouchers for your favourite brands

Building an inclusive work environment

At Co-op, we’re proud to do things a different way. As one of the world’s largest co-operatives, owned by millions of members, community is at the heart of what we do. Since our Co-op was founded in 1844, we’ve had a clear social purpose, and everything we do as a business helps to build a fairer world for our members, customers, colleagues, and communities.

We’re actively building diverse teams and we welcome applications from everyone. If you have a disability, we can make reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process according to your needs. We're also part of the Disability Confident scheme, meaning we'll always offer an interview to disabled candidates who apply through the scheme if they meet the minimum criteria for a job.

We'll ask whether you’d like to be considered under the Disability Confident scheme when you apply. If we invite you to take part in the recruitment process for any of our jobs, we’ll ask you if you need any reasonable adjustments to enable you to participate.

You can find out more about our recruitment process at jobs.coop.co.uk/apply-process.

You can find out more about the Disability Confident scheme and all our commitments to diversity and inclusion at colleagues.coop.co.uk/diversity-inclusion-and-wellbeing.

Please be aware that we may close applications for this role early