Lead Service Designer

We are looking to hire our first Lead Service Designer, to drive strategic systems thinking, exceptional collaboration, and advanced design craft at Utility Warehouse. You will be responsible for defining the bar for seamless, end-to-end customer experiences, ensuring that work across our digital, human, and operational touchpoints aligns with a clear Service Vision and delivers measurable user and business outcomes. While other Leads focus on specific product interfaces, your domain is the full customer lifecycle. You will lead complex, multi-service initiatives that span entire business units (digital platforms, contact centres, back-office operations, and digital/non-digital communications). You will be a respected guide to Heads of Product, Engineering Leads, and senior cross-functional stakeholders, guiding them to make decisions that balance customer needs, operational feasibility, and commercial priorities across all five of our core services.

What you’ll do and how you will make an impact:

• Lead Service Definition: Own the creation of Service Blueprints and Customer Journey Maps, ensuring accuracy across both front-stage digital interactions and back-stage operational processes.
• Strategic customer experience: Help to shape the Service Strategy for the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring it supports the goals of reducing customer friction and maximising digital adoption. You will prioritise the roadmap by selecting work that impacts the most critical journey stages.
• Architect Cross-Channel Flows: Design unified experiences across digital and non-digital channels, defining the strategy for effective self-serve and clear, supportive human escalation pathways.
• Ensure Operational Feasibility: Embed with operational teams to navigate process constraints and technical debt, ensuring service designs are not just desirable but scalable and grounded in reality.
• Drive Strategic Alignment: Partner with Product Owners, Engineers and Operations Managers to align roadmaps and decision-making with the holistic service vision.
• Influence Leadership: Translate research and design strategies into actionable insights, effectively guiding decision-making with senior stakeholders including Operations and Commercial leads.
• Elevate Practice Standards: Lead the maturity of the Service Design practice by establishing standards for mapping and metrics, while coaching peers in Systems Thinking.
• Cultivate Design Maturity: Mentor and coach peers (including UX Designers and Product Owners) to adopt a Systems Thinking approach, broadening their scope to consider the wider operational and business context.

Your team and the people you will work with:

You’ll be joining a high energy, creative UX team with a clear passion to drive improvements to our Customer experience. Reporting to the Head of UX, you’ll act as a subject matter expert for the wider team. This role requires a lot of cross functional working with both Product and Engineering teams as well as large parts of our Customer operation.

Qualifications:

Here’s the core skills and experience we’re looking for you to bring:

• Technical Mastery: Significant years of experience in UX design with a specialism in end to end Service planning and delivery across multiple channels. Deep expertise in service blueprinting at scale, end-to-end journey mapping and applied system thinking.
• Impact: The ability to shape business direction through deep operational and UX insight.
• Planning & Delivery: You are used to being highly visible across UX, Product, Engineering, and Customer Operations.
• Operational Excellence: You establish best practices for Service Design delivery, documentation and measurement in complex, multi-service organisations.
• Business & Domain Knowledge: Experience of working within highly-regulated consumer services sector (Energy, Telco, Financial Services).
• Leadership & Culture: Proven experience of proactively mentoring and coaching Designers and Product Managers in design thinking.

Additional Information:

So why pick UW? We’ve got big ambitions so there’s going to be plenty of challenges. There are also a lot of benefits:

• Competitive salary: We benchmark against the industry and will share the salary openly during our first conversation.
• Performance bonus: An annual discretionary bonus ranging from 15-40%.
• Work-life balance: We offer an optional four-day working week (90% pay for 90% impact).
• Work from anywhere: You can work abroad for up to three weeks, twice every tax year.
• Holiday: 25 days plus bank holidays (increasing with tenure), with the option to trade up to five days each year.
• UW discounts: Save on our services and get a free Cashback Card.
• Future planning: Matched-contribution pension scheme and life assurance (up to 4x salary).
• Family first: Policies designed to help you and your family thrive.
• Flexible benefits: An allowance for private health insurance, dental insurance, or gym membership.
• Sabbaticals: An eight-week paid sabbatical after four years of service.
• Growth: A dedicated learning and development budget and bi-annual promotion cycles.
• Inclusion: Join belonging groups that help shape our culture.
• Events: Company-wide celebrations including the ‘Great Big Get Together’ and our ‘Good Hearted Go-Getter Awards’.

Apply here: You’ve got this far… Hit apply - we can’t wait to hear from you! Worried you don’t hit all the criteria? We welcome applications from diverse and varied backgrounds so get your application in and let’s chat!

Claire Fennell will be your point of contact throughout the recruitment process. Not sure you meet all the requirements? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other underrepresented groups tend not to apply for jobs if they think they may not meet every qualification, when in fact they often do. We provide equal opportunities, a diverse and inclusive work environment, and fairness for everyone. You are welcome to apply no matter your age, disability, gender, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity status, race, religion or belief, or sexual orientation. Please don’t be afraid to ask about what we can do to support your needs. All requests will be carefully and fairly considered. Please note, if you are successful and offered a role at UW, you will be subject to a background check. Where checks are unsatisfactory or incomplete and/or a failure to reveal information relating to convictions that you are required to identify as part of the background checks, could lead to withdrawal of an offer of employment.