Lead Designer in Swansea

Made Tech wants to positively impact the country's future by using technology to improve society. We believe being design-led can create positive outcomes in the public sector through critical services enabled by technology. We’ve built a community of designers and researchers to support the public sector's growing demand for a design-led approach to service delivery.

Lead Designers at Made Tech are specialists in their design discipline(s). In this case, we’re looking for an expert practitioner in Interaction and Service Design who is able to coach, mentor and lead other designers within the Interaction and Service Design discipline at Made Tech. Success in this role means guiding the work of other designers within the Interaction and Service Design discipline to deliver positive outcomes.

• Responsible to the Head of Interaction and Service Design or a UCD Principal
• Hands-on design and design leadership for products and teams to assure the successful design and delivery of public services through technology
• Acts as an interaction-and-service-design subject matter expert, facilitating the design process and communicating design decisions to teams and setting expectations with stakeholders
• Takes an active role in the Service and Interaction Design community, leading on, developing, and sharing good practice
• Influencing team shapes to balance profit, utilisation and client needs at all stages of delivery (Bid stage, project initiation, with ongoing regular review and iteration)
• Actively supports retention, hiring, and team quality
• Mentoring and coaching within the design community and line management of other designers
• Create a shared understanding of problems to solve and ideas to test
• Make things real through storytelling and uncovering the ‘why’
• Caring about design enough to make sure everyone can use public services
• Make use of the Made Tech playbooks where they exist and support their development
• Make public services simple to explain, understand, and use by removing unnecessary complexity and keeping designs focused on creating positive outcomes for people and society
• Assure the quality of design delivery across multiple teams
• Raise and manage delivery risks to prevent them becoming issues using clear mitigation and management plans
• Introduce good habits for sharing and improving design work into teams
• Line management of designers
• Support the hiring and onboarding of designers (contract and permanent)
• Help define Made Tech design principles through delivering effective public services
• Represent and advocate for user-centred design publicly and internally
• Build relationships with clients, earning their trust and understanding their needs
• Support the sales team to win new work by contributing and reviewing bids relating to UCD
• Contribute to marketing materials (blogs, case studies, talks)
• Deliver your project objectives on time and to the expected standard
• Ensure your team members feel fully supported and engaged - provision of regular 1:1s, an effective cascade of information and progression of development plans

• Able to develop new and novel approaches to highly complex design challenges, based on fundamental interaction and service design principles
• Act as a leader and advocate for the Interaction and Service Design practice internally and externally
• Able to coach and mentor others, and define the interaction and service design standards which others will apply
• Influences the organisation, clients, partners and peers on the contribution of interaction and service design
• Develop a wide breadth of knowledge across the industry or business
• Work is often self-initiated
• Able to define an approach from first principles, and propose alternative ways to deliver
• Fully responsible for meeting objectives on an engagement
• Understand the relationship between interaction and service design, other disciplines, and wider client organisational requirements
• Defines what ‘good’ interaction and service design looks like on an engagement, enabling and holding others to account for producing high quality outputs and deliverables
• Establish milestones and have a significant role in the assignment of tasks and/or responsibilities
• Makes decisions which impact the success of assigned work, i.e. results, deadlines and budget
• Lead on user and client collaboration throughout all stages of work
• Ensures users’ needs are met consistently through each work stage

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We’ve recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose. Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays
• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
• Paid counseling - we offer paid counseling as well as financial and legal advice

If successful, you will be required to undertake an SC clearance.

Made Tech is on a mission to use technology to improve society - for everyone. We help organisations transform, deliver and manage world-class digital products and services. Today, you can see our services in action, such as the design and build of the Homes for Ukraine service, delivered in 2 weeks. We’re helping local authorities make it easier and quicker for people to log housing repairs online. By digitalising access to NHS services we’re making it more accessible, such as children needing mental health support. All this great experience is enabling us to support new areas, like energy. We’re helping to drive better environmental outcomes by improving network performance through real-time asset monitoring, which means less wasted energy. We were recently named as a finalist in the Raising the Bar for Workplace Transparency Award in the Shift People Awards. This is a recognition of our many great initiatives, such as our open-access employee handbook that we launched 5 years ago.