Lead Service Designer

This job is with Capgemini, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community.

At Capgemini, we partner with clients to build the future of their services, organisations, and customer experiences. As a Lead Service Designer in our Experience Design team, you will shape end‑to‑end, future state services that are human‑centred, data‑informed, and AI‑ready. You will work across complex ecosystems – spanning business, policy, people, and technology – transforming ambiguity into clarity and direction.

As a Lead, you will guide multidisciplinary teams, influence and guide senior stakeholders, and bring together strategy, research, prototyping, and delivery to define and launch services and transformation at scale. You will join our growing Digital Customer Experience (DCX) practice and play a key role in advancing our design approach, developing our culture, and maturing design capability across the organisation. This role blends strategic leadership with hands‑on craft. You will shape delivery, set standards, mentor designers, and help clients navigate some of their boldest transformation challenges. In this role you will go beyond design and work with accounts to shape client engagements and position design as a powerful business lever. You’ll report to the Head of Experience Design and work as their close partner in driving the practice forward.

Your role as a Lead includes owning the project lead role or acting as lead practitioner, depending on the size and complexity of the engagement. You will have input into – or ownership of – project planning and set‑up, ensuring you and the team can do your best work. You’ll still be hands‑on but balanced with leading others. Senior client stakeholders and project teams will see you as a trusted expert. You will build strong relationships with these groups, listen to their needs, and manage expectations with honesty. You will work with the Head of Experience Design and senior leadership to identify opportunities to extend current engagements or open new ones.

In This Role, You Will:

• Lead complex service and product design engagements end to end and define service strategies and future state architectures.
• Lead multidisciplinary teams to prototype, test, and launch new services and design and run research and insight programmes.
• Facilitate design sprints, experiments, and co‑creation activities and create detailed service blueprints, journeys, and propositions that can scale.
• Understand organisational, technical, and policy constraints and turn them into opportunity.
• Guide clients through complex decisions and influence long‑term change.

Capability and Practice Development You Will Also:

• Co‑lead the evolution of Experience Design methodology, tools, and quality standards across the practice.
• Mentor and develop service designers across grades, supporting performance management and career progression.
• Shape and contribute to the Experience Design Partnership model and its cross‑organisational delivery approach.
• Support GDS Centre of Excellence activities including assessment preparation, training, and compliance.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and team development as the practice continues to grow and support business development by contributing to proposals, scoping, and client shaping activities.

This is a highly impactful role where you can help lead some of the bravest digital and organisational transformations in the UK. You can bring your whole self to work. At Capgemini building an inclusive future is part of everyday life and will be part of your working reality. We have built a representative and welcoming environment, for everyone.

Your Skills And Experience:

You are a confident, strategic design practitioner with experience leading complex programmes and multidisciplinary teams. You bring a strong blend of business acumen, systems thinking, human‑centred design craft, client leadership, and delivery discipline.

Essential:

• Experience leading service design through full lifecycle including piloting and live operation, not just strategy or discovery phases and a track record of influencing senior stakeholders in complex, multi‑stakeholder, or regulated environments.
• Evidence of building design capability — whether establishing standards, mentoring designers, standing up new practices, or shaping assessment frameworks and strong facilitation skills: you can design and run workshops, design sprints, and co‑creation sessions with confidence.
• Fluency in service design methods: blueprinting, journey mapping, systems mapping, proposition development and experience managing and leading multidisciplinary teams, with strong feedback and performance development instincts.
• Comfort operating in the gap between design and delivery, particularly in agile or hybrid environments and the ability to manage upwards, initiate difficult conversations, and challenge constructively at all levels.

Highly Desirable:

• Experience working across multiple sectors — public sector, financial services, energy, healthcare, or commercial — with the ability to adapt to different governance and delivery contexts.
• Experience with GDS Service Standard and assessment processes, or equivalent quality and compliance frameworks in regulated industries.
• Understanding of accessibility requirements and regulatory constraints relevant to service design.
• Experience with developer experience research, quantitative survey design, or operational service measurement.
• Familiarity and commitment to developing the skills needed to design services that make use of AI — working with technology and architecture teams to bring AI‑enabled services, experiences and ideas to life.

Your Background:

Our design team is an incredibly talented group of hybrids — and that’s something we embrace. The team includes people with backgrounds in design, complex digital transformation, organisational change and design, strategy, and business analysis. We know unicorns don’t exist, but we value practitioners who span multiple areas of service design with depth in at least one. Whether your background is in service design, product strategy, organisational design, UX, product, or CX transformation — what matters is your ability to lead, think systemically, and deliver.

We are a Disability Confident Employer. Capgemini is proud to be a Disability Confident Employer (Level 2) under the UK Government’s Disability Confident scheme. As part of our commitment to inclusive recruitment, we will offer an interview to all candidates who declare they have a disability, and meet the minimum essential criteria for the role. Please opt in during the application process.

Your security clearance:

Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS). To be successfully appointed to this role you will need to undergo Baseline Personnel Security Standard checks. There are no nationality or residency restrictions, although if you have resided outside of the UK within the last 3 years, further checks may be required. There are other criteria and checks required for BPSS, and throughout the recruitment process, you will be asked questions about your security clearance eligibility such as, but not limited to, country of residence and nationality. This role requires you to be also eligible for Security Clearance.

You will reimagine what’s possible: creating value for the world’s leading organisations through technology to build a sustainable, more inclusive future. You will work with a range of clients all with a unique set of business, technological and societal ambitions, which will make a real impact across the UK. Capgemini. Make it real.