Lead Designer

This role is open to those interested in working across both service and interaction design, with a particular focus on service design. Please note: We anticipate a high volume of applications for this role, so may close applications early. We encourage putting your application in (mainly CV) as soon as you can.

Lead Designers at Made Tech are specialists in their design discipline(s). In this case, we’re looking for an expert practitioner 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.

About the role

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:

• Take the initiative and are fully responsible for their own outcomes
• Responsible for overall interaction and service design outcomes of engagements
• Highly accountable
• Have a growth mindset
• Candid-but-kind communicators

Key Responsibilities

Scope

• 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.

Practice

• 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.

Leading teams

• 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.

Community

• 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).

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

At this point, we hope you’re feeling excited about Made Tech and the job opportunity. Even if you don’t feel that you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Get in touch with our talent team if you’d like an informal chat about the role and your suitability before applying.

Security Clearance

An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we’re ideally looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility. Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' UK residency and 5 year employment history (or back to full-time education).

Support in applying

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email talent@madetech.com.

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.