We’re hiring two leadership roles to deliver seamless, user-centred services

Our team works across the entire organisation, designing services and products for millions of clients. Our mission is to design inclusive and effective ways of solving complex problems.

Kylie Havelock
5 min readJul 9, 2020
Prototyping a digital energy service

We have two exciting leadership roles coming up in the Customer Journey, each with an ambitious and mission-driven remit.

➛Take me to the job applications [Closing date 26th July]

Product Design Lead and Seamless Customer Journey Lead

➛Chat to Kylie and Rebecca about the roles

We’re holding time for informal chats so you can learn more about the roles and ask us questions. See the end of this blogpost for details.

The team you’ll be joining

The Customer Journey team is at the heart of the organisation’s ambition to deliver our vision for 2022. We’re growing fast, and today, we have 7 multidisciplinary product teams (digital products for the public and advisers) and 6 service teams (end-to-end multi-channel services).

You’ll come at an exciting time where you can make a huge impact and tackle the challenge of designing services that work across multiple channels, devices, browsers, and platforms.

Our team have been integral to our organisation’s response to COVID-19. Local Citizens Advice and operations colleagues are doing amazing work to keep services running, and increase phone and digital provision. The customer journey team and colleagues are creating new and updated content on coronavirus and related issues, for the public and advisors.

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 regardless of COVID-19 we all work remotely regularly.

These roles are part of our extended leadership team; which includes product management, service design, user research, development, data, and delivery management. Together we lead the Customer Journey team to do their best work in a supportive, collaborative, and inclusive environment.

Product Design Lead role

Hiring Manager: Kylie Havelock, Head of Product

We’re looking for an experienced and inclusive problem-solver, with lots of experience of product design, to lead our Product Design community at Citizens Advice. You’ll lead a multi-level team of Product Designers working across the organisation, collectively delivering a sustainable, user-led approach to advice.

What we mean when we say ‘Product Design’

In Customer Journey we often design digital products, but we’re not limited to digital. Our Product Designers designs products, touchpoints, and services.

We break Product Design down to 4 aspects of design:

  • User Experience (UX) Design — how a thing feels
  • Interaction Design — how a thing behaves
  • User Interface Design — how a thing looks
  • Information Architecture — how a thing is structured

You’ll lead the practice of product design across all of these areas, solving difficult design problems and working on things that really matter. You’ll bring your team onboard with ideas, and coordinate design activities across multiple products to enable a clear and unified user experience.

You’ll be responsible for ensuring the right conditions for designers to work effectively. You’ll set design direction, assure the quality of design delivery across teams, and make sure we design with all users in mind. You’ll be an ally and mentor to other designers who will learn from your skills and experience.

You’ll provide leadership and coaching to the Product Design community, ensuring the team work collaboratively and consistently across all products and platforms. You will help us meet our mission by discovering new ways of approaching (and solving) complex problems and concepts, across the full breadth of product design.

Seamless Customer Journey Lead role

Hiring Manager: Rebecca Kemp, Director of Customer Journey

This person will lead a multi-disciplinary team to create change across our service, so we provide a seamless customer experience for our clients, whatever channel or part of the service they use.

We’re looking for someone with lots of experience of service design or service transformation, who has experience of making services more user-centred, and leading change through others. As with the Product Design lead, we’re looking for someone who leads in an inclusive way.

What we mean when we say ‘seamless customer journey’

Our Future of Advice strategic framework sets out a commitment to us creating a seamless customer journey for our clients, whatever channel or part of our service they use. This role will bring this to life by leading a programme of work across the customer journey team, national organisation, and network to create a seamless journey.

This will involve directly managing a small team of designers and researchers, and directing the work of colleagues across the organisation and network. The role requires extensive stakeholder management and relationship building, including with colleagues who are new to user-centred design.

You won’t be starting from scratch. The team has already carried out a discovery phase looking across all our services. The team and colleagues across our service are implementing ideas from this through our COVID-19 response work, to move us closer to a seamless customer journey. In this financial year we are focusing on one exemplar service to create a seamless customer journey — our consumer service. A discovery phase into that service is underway now.

Interested? Know someone who might be?

Let’s have a chat! Our DMs are open on Twitter, and you can also email Kylie or Rebecca directly** to find out more.

We’re 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:

Product Design Lead: chat to Kylie

  • Monday 13th July 10am -11:30am, and 3–5pm
  • Tuesday 14th July 11am — 2pm, and 4–5pm

Seamless Customer Journey Lead: chat to Rebecca

  • Friday 17th July 2–5pm
  • Monday 20th July 2–5pm

To book a slot, email the relevant hiring manager with your preferred date and time. If you can’t make any of the above, drop us a note and we’ll figure out an alternative.

**No recruiters please. No, really.

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Kylie Havelock

Director of Product & Platforms @CitizensAdvice. Prev @GDS_GC @Justice_Digital. Board @LocalWelcome. Fellow @CloreSocial.