We’re hiring a Lead for our Service Design community
Our service designers work across every part of our organisation. Our goal is to use design thinking to fundamentally change how we develop, improve, and scale our services across all channels.
➛Take me to the job application [Closing date 18th August]
➛Chat to Kylie about the role
We’re looking for an experienced and empathetic service designer to lead our community at Citizens Advice. You’ll manage a multi-level team of service designers working across the organisation, collectively delivering a sustainable, user-led approach to advice. Our team are at the heart of the organisation’s ambition to deliver our vision for 2022.
You’ll be defining and assuring good Service Design practice whilst influencing, leading and mentoring others. You’ll be responsible for ensuring the right conditions and environment for service designers to work effectively. Your work will help us scale the application of design thinking to service operations, ensuring a high bar of quality and a focus on solving problems.
You’ll use service design methodology as a way to run rapid experiments, to show value, to get buy-in, and to better understand the experience our users are having. You don’t need to have a degree in design. What matters is that you are able to demonstrate core concepts and methods in practice. You’ll focus on improving the ‘behind the scenes’ of the operational environment, and understanding it’s relationship to the ‘front stage’ user-facing experience.
Everyone is welcome at Citizens Advice. We care deeply about inclusive working practices and diverse teams. If you’d prefer to work flexibly, or part-time, we’ll facilitate this — whether to help you meet other commitments or to help you strike a great work-life balance. Several of our leadership team work 4 days a week, and we all work from home regularly.
What you’ll do every day
You’ll provide leadership and coaching to the service design team, ensuring the team work collaboratively and consistently across all service areas. You will help us meet our mission by applying the skills of the team towards the design, operation, and improvement of user-centred services.
You’ll be excited by the challenge of designing services that work across multiple channels, devices, browsers, and platforms. You and your team will ensure we’re building meaningful, accessible, inclusive, and secure services in the open. You’ll be:
- leading a community of 12 service designers embedded in multidisciplinary product and programme teams, working across all the touchpoints that make up our service
- collaborating with your leadership peers within digital, design, operations, programme management, and business development to make sure our services are effective, sustainable, and flexible
- guiding and mentoring your team in their work and career progression, helping them to set clear development goals, define their career paths, identify training needs, and do their best work
- defining and monitoring the overall quality, performance, and development standards for service design in the organisation
- finding, recruiting and on-boarding brilliant new service designers at assistant, mid, and senior levels, including people from non-design backgrounds
- representing us publicly in the ways that feel natural to you: writing, speaking, or running events in order to share what we do.
- taking a responsible and ethical approach, considering the social impact our services create, navigating power in service structures, and minimising potential unintended consequences
Apply if
- you’re passionate about growing and hiring new leaders, developing designers’ skills and careers, and inspiring and motivating people to do their best work
- you have significant experience of designing and improving both new and existing services, including research, experimentation, rapid prototyping, testing, and iteration
- you have a deep understanding of core service design capabilities, and you’ve applied and adapted them to the reality of operational contexts, valuing small iterations as much as big picture strategy work
- you have strong communication and presentation skills, and are fluent in explaining complex design decisions and implications to specialist and non-specialist audiences alike
- you embrace working in the open and enjoy sharing with other organisations, and you have the humility, adaptability and courage to try new things
- you’re comfortable making and guiding effective design decisions at both a systems and detailed experience level, from user interactions to backend processes and policy across digital and non-digital touchpoints
- you’re passionate about service design and want to work in an equity-driven organisation solving complex problems for vulnerable groups
- what we’re doing here at Citizens Advice excites you!
Interested? Know someone who might be?
Let’s have a chat! My DMs are open on Twitter, and you can also email me directly* to find out more.
I’m also holding space for open, informal video calls if you’d like to find out more about the role to help you decide if you want to apply:
- Monday 12th August 9am-1pm
- Thursday 15th August 10:30am — 4pm
To book a slot, email me with your preferred date and time. If you can’t make any of the above, drop me a note and we’ll figure out an alternative.
*No recruiters please. No, really.
