Head of Service Design

• Salary: £70,000 +
• Full time 37.5 hours
• London

About the company

Snook are on a mission to design a world that works better for people.

We work with organisations to design more effective services which help people thrive. We do this by engaging with users, building digital products, training our clients, and much more.

This year we’re ten years old. In the past five years, we’ve scaled to more than double our original size when we started up in Scotland. We’ve opened a London office and our team is approaching 40 people. And we’ve worked with brilliant clients — from Cancer Research UK and Tesco to Hackney City Council and the Scottish Government.

About the role

We are looking to recruit a Head of Service Design to provide strong leadership and coaching to our growing design and delivery teams. The role will be key to ensuring the team do their best work, maintaining consistency of high quality delivery across our projects and pushing us to meet our mission by designing services that have real impact on people’s lives.

You will champion user-centred design and research within Snook, with our clients and partners, and across the wider design industry.

You will work closely with our Head of Design to grow and develop our service design practice across Snook’s studios and our partners.

Requirements 

We’re keen to hear from a range of applicants, not just those who have worked in the design or creative industries.

You should be able to demonstrate that you are able to meet some, or all, of the following requirements:

• Capable of making and guiding effective decisions, thinking at both a systems level and a detailed experience level.
• Is able to define, assess and improve upon our existing service design practice, process and methodologies.
• Is able to train and support the development of our service design practitioners and identify skill gaps and areas of opportunity to expand and improve upon our service design offering.
• Capable of working with the wider team to develop a culture of service design across both our London and Glasgow studios.
• Capable of providing leadership across the service design team, and of contributing to the wider strategic aims of the company.
• Can provide critique of existing service design work, identifying areas of concern and opportunity, helping coach the project teams to successful outcomes.
• Understand how services are powered by the internet, technology and data.
• Work confidently with technology teams to run projects from discovery through to live.
• Have knowledge and interest in the wider digital economy and advances in technology.
• Support our project teams to define key metrics and measurements for client organisations; empowering them to evaluate their impact, and supporting them to use this data to iterate what they deliver.
• Confidence in providing guidance and leadership to our team
• Coach and mentor service designers in Snook, running appraisal processes and supporting their development while identifying training needs.
• Lead project teams and provide direction across the wider project portfolio.
• Run learning sessions and research crits regularly on projects and for both studios.
• Be a voice of Snook’s values and story on the outside of the organisation to push the development of our practice as an industry.
• Bring an optimistic and entrepreneurial mindset to our work, supporting directors to spot and enable new business opportunities.
• Able to support the Senior Leadership team in creating new business proposals and in pitching for new work.
• Support the recruitment of new team members
• Support the senior leadership team to grow and develop the organisation in line with our company strategy.
• Support our Head of Delivery in resourcing and assigning project teams and ensuring projects have a clear scope and goals, and are delivered to agreed time and quality standards

Your skills and experience

• Experience in designing and delivering inclusive services.
• Experience of delivering training to service designers, and across other disciplines.
• Experience in interpreting user research into user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Expertise in a wide range research and design activities and methods.
• Experience of leading, managing and coaching designers.
• Experience of leading agile, multidisciplinary project teams
• A strong portfolio of complex design projects
• Expertise in a wide range of service design techniques and methods.
• Experience of conducting usability tests at all phases of the agile service design process in person and online.
• Experience of collaborating with research and development teams.
• Experience of building a team, interviewing, managing performance, and development of team members
• Experience of creating new business proposals and of pitching for new client work.
• Demonstrable experience of being a leader in your field and driving best practice.
• Experience of working with and understanding the constraints of design systems such as Gov.uk prototyping kit (desirable).

What we offer 

Snook offer a competitive salary, 29.5 holidays per year (including public holidays), additional annual Christmas closure and a supportive maternity leave policy.

We provide an annual training budget for external opportunities from talks and conferences to more bespoke hands-on training.

We respect that people have commitments and provide flexible working hours through discussion.

We have an annual team-away retreat for us to come together as a company, taking time out to learn, reflect, and eat snacks.

We spend a Friday together every quarter as one studio to run show and tells.

Every Monday morning, we have a team breakfast where we eat together and share our ambitions for the week ahead.

We are an equal opportunity, Disability Confident and Living Wage Foundation employer.

We have a bike to work scheme and free membership to HeadSpace the mental health app.

We support you with a Snook buddy when you join to get you started.

We strive for diversity in our team. If we’re going to design services for the public we need to ensure our team is inclusive. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and ages, however all applicants must have the right to work in the UK.

How to apply 

This is a rolling recruitment campaign so please don’t wait to submit your application. We are sifting and interviewing candidates on a weekly basis.

Please submit a CV, cover letter and a portfolio of your work highlighting key projects. If you do not have a portfolio, we have created a simple template that you can use.

Send your CV, cover letter and portfolio as pdfs to jobs@wearesnook.com with the title “Hire me: Head of Service Design”.

In your covering letter, please tell us a little bit about yourself, why you want to work at Snook and what sort of design problems you’d be interested in tackling with us.

Due to the current Covid-19 epidemic, we anticipate that all interviews will be conducted remotely. We will offer interviews at times that suit you, so if you have children, caring duties, or other circumstances affecting your availability for an interview, we’re happy to offer convenient times outside of work hours.