Lead Service Designer - DBT - G7

Lead Service Designer – DBT – G7

Join to apply for the Lead Service Designer – DBT – G7 role at Manchester Digital.

Location:

Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission – to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways: first, build a strong, competitive business environment; second, open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains; third, partner with businesses daily, providing advance, finance and deal‑making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission. The team has been nominated four times in a row for ‘Best Public Sector Employer’ at the Women in Tech awards.

As a Lead Service Designer at DBT you will identify gaps and opportunities in existing services and look for opportunities to create new ones. Working in a user‑centred multidisciplinary team alongside researchers, developers and other designers, you’ll bring a wide view of the landscape, act as the voice of the user and business, and collaborate with product managers and service owners to help understand and communicate the complexities of our services.

You will create visions, strategies, and roadmaps to guide teams and stakeholders while documenting holistic user journeys to communicate and help make and understand key decisions. We’re looking for someone who will analyse existing services to understand pain and failure points and actively promote good design rationale with the team and stakeholders to ensure quality outcomes.

To be effective in this position, you will need to understand the needs of users and stakeholders and be able to communicate this in an engaging way, whether by creating prototypes to test an idea or by creating design patterns that can be used across our services to ensure consistency and scalability.

• Understand and advocate for user needs, ensuring services are designed to meet them. Lead communication with colleagues across DBT to define user journeys and articulate product visions.
• Engage and manage stakeholder needs, driving the communication of insights and strategies to senior stakeholders and management.
• Track user interactions across boundaries, create user journeys to highlight pain points and improvements, and design systems across multiple services, ensuring simple and evidence‑based outcomes.
• Demonstrate expertise in service design, helping others understand its value, and lead evidence‑based design direction. Create high‑quality deliverables such as personas, experience maps, and service blueprints.
• Lead on the analysis of research findings, identify improvement opportunities, and communicate design solutions that address user needs and business outcomes; use prototyping methods to share ideas with real users and encourage collaboration.
• Bring the team and stakeholders along the journey, ensuring feedback is incorporated, and act as an authority on service design, managing, training, and mentoring other designers, leading the capability and promotion of service design within the department and across government.
• Identify cost‑saving opportunities while implementing best practice service design, promoting best practice and building a collaborative culture within the Service Design team.

• Significant experience of hands‑on service design with a strong understanding of user needs and designing services to support these needs (Lead Criteria).
• The ability to analyse pain points and communicate design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• Experience working in agile cross‑functional teams, collaborating with user researchers and business analysts to inform design outcomes, and the ability to coach and mentor junior colleagues on Service Design.
• The ability to develop and manage long‑term strategic relationships with stakeholders, identifying where…