Senior Service Design Lead: Strategy, Agile & Impact in Manchester

About The Role

Hippo is recruiting for senior consultants in service design. Service designers take a holistic approach to evaluating our client’s business ecosystem and lead the strategic planning for our client’s services. You’ll co‑create new service propositions or evolve existing services and manage relationships between different groups. You’re a champion of user‑centred design and also have a strong understanding of Agile methodology and how the different members of an Agile team contribute to service design.

What you’ll do

As a senior consultant in service design, you’ll be seen by the client project team and senior client stakeholders as a trusted expert in your field. You may perform the role of a service delivery lead overseeing Hippo’s project delivery team. Depending on the size, complexity, and needs of the project, you will manage various dependencies across teams and departments. You will support the team in delivering at pace by working effectively across organisational, technical, and situational boundaries and translating concepts into tangible deliverables for the team to execute on. Contributing to the service design Community of Practice, you may also be a line manager. Hippo will provide exciting opportunities to share your expertise to influence clients and team members and to develop as a leader.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead strategic planning for the client’s service to ensure it meets business and user needs.
• Articulate goals for the service through artefacts such as service maps, value propositions or service blueprints.
• Provide advice and recommendations on potential approaches to organisational problems.
• Plan and facilitate groups toward a common goal and be the voice of the customer in the room.
• Generate concepts, proposals and plans for new service propositions, or to evolve and improve existing services.
• Simplify complex, cross‑departmental information and processes, making them understandable to all through visual communication.

Skills and experience that you need

You will be an expert at designing services from end to end and improving existing services that are underperforming. Your work will be primarily self‑initiated. Experience of working with service/product owners and senior stakeholders is essential, as is the ability to take a pragmatic approach to meeting a client’s needs. You will also:

• Be confident working with senior stakeholders, demonstrating how user research and service design analysis techniques have been used to support the design decisions.
• Manage relationships effectively, building long‑term, strategic partnerships.
• Have advanced experience with Agile delivery.
• Be able to create trust and authenticity in teams and can respond to challenges.

Government Digital Service (GDS) or Public Sector experience is an advantage but not essential. Service design is a fairly new and broad profession and we expect you to have expertise or experience in one or more of the following related design disciplines: user experience design; business analysis; digital strategy; business architecture; product management.

Benefits

As well as a competitive salary which we’re transparent about from the outset, you can also expect a range of benefits:

• Contributory pension scheme (Hippo 6% with employee contributions of 2%)
• 25 days holiday plus UK public holidays
• Perkbox access for a wide range of discounts
• Critical illness cover
• Life assurance and death in service cover
• Volunteer days
• Cycle‑to‑work scheme for the avid cyclists
• Salary sacrifice electric vehicles scheme
• Season ticket loans
• Financial and general wellbeing sessions
• Flexible benefits scheme with options of: private health cover, private dental cover, additional company pension contributions, additional holidays (up to an extra 2 days), wellbeing contribution, charity contributions, tree planting

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Hippo

At Hippo, we’re dedicated to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace that works for everyone. We understand that having a diverse team unlocks our capacity for innovation, creativity and problem solving. Only by building a community of diverse perspectives, cultures and socio‑economic backgrounds can we create an environment where all can contribute and thrive. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented groups including women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent and people with disabilities. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process that reflects our workplace culture. We are a registered Disability Confident Employer, Mindful Employer, Endometriosis Friendly Employer and a member of the Armed Forces Covenant. Hippo continually strives to remove barriers, provide accommodations and offer reasonable adjustments to ensure equity throughout our practices.

Hippo locations

We are headquartered in Leeds and have offices across the UK in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London and Bristol. We’re on the lookout for top talent nationwide but you need to be located within reasonable travelling distance from one of our offices which will be your contracted office location. Given the dynamic nature of a consulting business, you may be required to work on‑site at a Hippo office or at an in/out of town client location for a number of days per week (client dependent) and therefore candidates will need to be open/flexible to travel. Plus, we offer a generous relocation support package of up to £8k (please ask for terms and conditions) to help make your move a smooth one.