Senior Service Designer

Are you passionate about designing end‑to‑end services that make a real difference for diverse user needs?

Join The Open University as a Senior Service Designer and play a pivotal role in shaping inclusive, accessible, and coherent services across one of the UK’s most complex and impactful organisations. You’ll lead service design work across multi‑channel services, working from discovery through to live operations, while helping to mature our service‑oriented approach and design community.

As a Senior Service Designer, you will play a key role in maturing the OU's Design community and service-oriented approach. This role offers opportunities to lead service design work across complex service areas with a strategic and holistic mindset, working from discovery through to live operations and create space and the right conditions for good service design within product teams and across service areas, enabling designers and teams to do their best work.

• Lead service design work across complex service areas with a strategic and holistic mindset, working from discovery through to live operations.
• Define service scope based on user needs, working end-to-end across all channels (digital, phone, post, face‑to‑face) and ensuring coherent experiences.
• Create space and the right conditions for good service design within product teams and across service areas, enabling designers and teams to do their best work.
• Lead multi-disciplinary teams to design user‑centred services that reduce complexity and improve outcomes, engaging Product, Engineering, Content, Research and Operations colleagues.
• Use advanced techniques to articulate problem statements and relate them to business value through clear outcomes, KPIs and cost‑to‑serve measures.
• Lead and coach junior designers in service design practice and strategic thinking, providing structured feedback and development support.
• Identify opportunities for cost reduction and service improvement, making evidence‑based recommendations for stopping, continuing or scaling work.
• Lead the design and iteration of common components and service patterns to improve reuse, consistency, accessibility and usability across services.
• Establish processes to share knowledge and ensure designs are reusable and consistent with the  Service Standard, accessibility requirements and OU design standards.
• Negotiate, plan and deliver service design work across teams, managing both planned and unplanned work while balancing strategic and operational needs.
• Communicate service strategy, designs and decisions effectively to diverse audiences including senior stakeholders, building and presenting compelling cases.
• Champion accessibility, inclusion and security across all service design work, ensuring services work for users with diverse needs and lowest digital access.
• Be an ambassador of the Service Design community of practice, contributing to collective knowledge and helping to make service design more consistent.

• Work at L3‑L4 (Competent → Proficient) level across the Service Design Capability Framework, with measurable impact in your area and ability to shape how capabilities are applied.
• Lead service design for journey slices, sequencing work (now/next/later), aligning people, budget and dependencies, and securing go/no‑go decisions.
• Run governance cadences (packs, stage gates, decision meetings) that reduce rework across squads and surface risks early.
• Make decisions evidence‑ready by agreeing baselines and targets, linking data and probes to decision points, and using results to adjust course.
• Identify capacity and capability gaps in teams, working with leadership to fill them and create opportunities for learning and development.
• Embed accessibility, inclusion and security requirements into definitions of 'done' and acceptance criteria.
• Set experiment strategies for service areas, determining what to test, when, and with whom, building reusable test assets.
• Create map & metrics views that decision‑makers use to prioritise work, linking service metrics to OKRs and showing early movement.
• Author or update service patterns, socialise them and track adoption,…