Lead Service Designer

We're looking for Lead Service Designers who can help the UC design teams and the wider Department to identify, explore and understand key problem statements and collaborate to hypothesise and test different approaches to deliver outcomes for the people using our services. We are looking for confident candidates with great facilitation skills who can help bring teams and stakeholders together, provide frameworks and common languages to help understand problems. We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates who have worked with policy and strategy teams as a large part of this role will be maturing our approach to new and emerging policy. You'll be working alongside other user centred design professionals who are committed to deliver the best possible outcomes for all our users and ensuring everything we design is accessible to everyone. You'll join a highly supportive community, sharing your expertise, and learning new skills from those around you. As a Lead Service Designer, you will play a critical role in being a mentor and role model for the wider Service Design team. As a Lead Service Designer, you will lead and drive the exploration and understanding of emerging policy and business strategy for the Universal Credit service working closely with the Lead Product Managers and Product Strategy team to mature and adapt the service to meet the needs of all the people who use Universal Credit. You will be as passionate about people as you are about service design, championing and leading collaboration between teams spanning digital, policy, legal and others to define, design and deliver a great service. As a Lead Service Designer, you are an expert practitioner. You have a proven track record of representing and advocating for user-centred design even where it's not present but should be. You will have excellent workshop facilitation and stakeholder skills to engage with colleagues from across the Department. You will have proven experience in driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted in successful service outcomes. You understand user needs and business or policy goals and can support strategy and decision making. You will set direction to define and then implement good practice and make sure that useful guidance, tools and patterns are available across services and teams to solve recurring problems for users. You will define and initiate work to designers so they can visualise whole services, both end to end and front to back, across business areas or departments in order to reduce or remove issues and problems. Role and Responsibilities

• Understand user needs and help others to do understand them too, so that collectively we can design Universal Credit and other services to support those needs.
• Align and lead the communication with Lead Product Managers and policy colleagues to define the user journey and articulate the vision for products and services.
• Engage and manage stakeholder needs across different areas with a focus on heading discussions at senior departmental level.
• Demonstrate strong working knowledge of service design in practice as a recognised industry expert and help others to understand its value for both service users and in helping the Department to meet its business objectives.
• Lead design direction based on evidence.
• Drive the creation of high-quality service design deliverables, including personas, experience maps, insights packs, user flow maps, and service blueprints.
• Analyse research findings, data, insight gathering, critical thinking and concept generation.
• Understand as-is service design and identify improvement opportunities.
• Analyse pain points within services and communicate and share design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• Drive the communication of insights and stories around the strategy and concepts being designed to senior stakeholders and management.
• Use prototyping methods to communicate and share ideas and concepts with real users to encourage collaboration and iterative processes.
• Lead the adoption of best practice and build a strong open and collaborative culture within the Department and feed into the design community.
• Analyse and identify cost saving opportunities whilst implementing best practice service design.
• Define the service design approach and key items on the design agenda, working to implement best practice.
• Actively provide support and mentor team members whilst developing appropriate training to support designers.
• Lead the capability and promote service design in and beyond the Department.
• Support recruitment for the DWP Digital Product design community.
  
  Disability Confident
About Disability Confident A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. For more details please go to Disability Confident.

DWP Digital offers fulfilling careers for people who want to use their skills to make a genuine difference to society. We're part of the UK's biggest government department, supporting millions of people every day. We deliver products, services, support and payments to people at key times in their lives. Universal Credit (UC) is one of the highest profile digital transformation programmes in the world, praised for its fast and flexible response to the Covid-19 pandemic and now in use by around 7 million claimants and 30,000 staff.