Lead Service Designer

Lead Service Designer

Pay up to 83,957, plus 28.97% employer pension contributions, hybrid working, flexible hours, and great work life balance.

DWP. Digital with Purpose.

We are looking for a Lead Service Designer to join our community of tech experts in DWP Digital.

We’re using fresh ideas and leading-edge tech to build and maintain digital solutions that will be used by nearly every person in the UK, every day and at key moments in their lives.

DWP is the UK’s largest government department. We help people into work, and make payments worth over 195bn a year to support and empower millions of people.

The scale of what we do is extraordinary, and our purpose is unique. We’d love you to join us.

What skills, knowledge and experience will you need?

• Understand user needs and help others to do understand them too, so that collectively we can design Universal Credit and other services to support those needs.
• Align and lead the communication with Lead Product Managers and policy colleagues to define the user journey and articulate the vision for products and services.
• Engage and manage stakeholder needs across different areas with a focus on heading discussions at senior departmental level.
• Demonstrate strong working knowledge of service design in practice as a recognised industry expert and help others to understand its value for both service users and in helping the Department to meet its business objectives.
• Lead design direction based on evidence.
• Drive the creation of high-quality service design deliverables, including personas, experience maps, insights packs, user flow maps, and service blueprints.
• Analyse research findings, data, insight gathering, critical thinking and concept generation.
• Understand as-is service design and identify improvement opportunities.
• Analyse pain points within services and communicate and share design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• Drive the communication of insights and stories around the strategy and concepts being designed to senior stakeholders and management.
• Use prototyping methods to communicate and share ideas and concepts with real users to encourage collaboration and iterative processes.
• Lead the adoption of best practice and build a strong open and collaborative culture within the Department and feed into the design community.
• Analyse and identify cost saving opportunities whilst implementing best practice service design.
• Define the service design approach and key items on the design agenda, working to implement best practice.
• Actively provide support and mentor team members whilst developing appropriate training to support designers.
• Lead the capability and promote service design in and beyond the Department.
• Support recruitment for the DWP Digital Product design community.

You and your role

As a Lead Service Designer, you will be the forefront of emerging policy and business strategy for our Universal Credit (UC) service, leading and supporting a team of service designers to create user-centric systems and services, guided by evidence. You will be shaping our design strategy, transforming insights in design concepts, leveraging protoyping methods to share ideas and drive collaboration.

Details. Wages. Perks.

Location: You’ll join us in one of our brilliant digital hubs in Leeds, London and Manchester, whichever is most convenient for you.

Hybrid Working: We work a hybrid model – you’ll spend some time working at home and some time collaborating face to face in a hub.

Pay: We offer competitive pay of up to 83,957.

Pension: You’ll get a brilliant civil service pension with employer contributions worth 28.97%, worth up to 24,363 per year.

Holidays: A generous leave package starting at 26 days rising to 31 days over time.

You can also take up to 3 extra days off a month on flexi-time. You’ll also get all the usual public holidays.

We have a broad benefits package built around your work-life balance which includes:

• An award-winning environment and culture: Employer of the Year 2023 (Women In IT Awards), Founders Award for Outstanding Digital Leadership 2023 (Digital 100)
• Flexible working including flexible hours and flex-friendly policies
• Time off volunteering and charitable giving
• Bring your authentic self to work with ‘I Can Be Me in DWP’
• Discounts and savings on shopping, fun days out and more
• Interest-free loans to buy a bike or a season ticket, so it’s even easier for you to get to work and start making a difference
• Sports and social activities
• Professional development, coaching, mentoring and career progression opportunities.

Process:

We know your time is valuable so our application and selection process is just two stages:

1. Apply: complete your application on Civil Service Jobs. There’ll be full instructions when you click through.
2. Interview: a single stage interview online.

CLICK APPLY for more information and to start your application.