Lead Service Designer

Admiral Pioneer is a new business within the Admiral Group with the objective of seeding, launching, and scaling new businesses that will become the growth engines for Admiral in the 10-year time frame.

These new businesses will anchor around meeting customer needs in growth areas. We will achieve this by experimenting and proving new products, business models, and partnerships through a disciplined, discovery-driven approach.

Admiral Pioneer is a vibrant environment in which talented people can bring their skills and passion to build businesses that have a positive impact on customers, communities, and society. We are looking for people who want to jump in with both feet and commit to building successful businesses from the ground up.

Role Purpose

This role reports directly to the CEO of Pioneer with a remit to create and lead the user-centred design capability within Pioneer. You will have accountability to introduce and test new approaches to customer research, insight generation, and rapid prototyping. These capabilities will be used within Product teams to design and test propositional elements with real customers. You will also steer the development of this capability by coaching and overseeing new members of the Service Design function to build a centre of excellence for user-centred design within Pioneer

Key Accountabilities

• • Responsibility for building a best in class service design capability (customer insight platforms, ideation of customer concepts, prioritisation, socialisation and detailed design of customer products)
  • Embed and retain the customer design principles and vision through the lifecycle of a product build including all elements of testing, iteration, user experience, go to market and servicing
  • Responsible for the design of 3-4 new products per year including all elements the ‘double diamond’ approach
  • Coach apprentice Service Designers to accelerate their development in this discipline and oversee their work
  • Work with Product Owners to deliver the MVP roadmap through ongoing customer testing and refinement to ensure features are delivered quickly and efficiently using the lean MVP approach
  • Maintain a strong commercial perspective – understanding the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability by working closely with Pioneer commercial, operational and technical leads
  • Have strong experience of initiating and leading customer research within GDPR compliant environments
  • Track and monitor product / feature performance and functionality after launch to iterate and improve user experience design
  • Prepare for scaling of prioritised opportunities in collaboration with Product Owner

Communication And Working Relationships

• • An essential part of a cross-functional team working for the CEO / Product Lead and partnering with other Product Managers, CX, UX, Developers and Data Leads
  • Manage a cross-disciplinary proposition team including Service Design, UX, CX, and Content
  • Influence and respond to the Pioneer leadership team
  • External market including:
    • Consumers
    • Third-party researchers and insight experts
    • Comfortable working with regulatory bodies e.g. FCA and other similar organisations
    • Associations, government, charities, and other market influencing groups

Problem-solving

Ability to translate deep market and customer understanding into product concepts

• • High aptitude for innovative product and business model development from scratch (blank sheet) without constraints of an existing product or distribution model
  • Contribute to setting hypotheses, defining assumptions and design products to test these assumptions as MVP and Beta
  • Ability to integrate qualitative customer insight with data to arrive at deeper insights from which to make propositional decisions
  • Ability to change course and refine based on data and insight from customer and commercial inputs as experiments are tested

Collaborate with broader Pioneer team and Domain / Product Owners to align plans and communicate progress and changes

• • Passionate about designing new world-class user experiences
  • Deep expertise in ethnographic and immersive customer research (ideally with research qualifications)
  • Deep expertise in service design (ideally with design qualifications and at least five years heading up design projects) with emphasis on disruptive innovation from idea conception through design, prototyping, MVP, and Beta
  • Adept at communicating insights and opportunities, visual story-telling and influencing at all levels of a business
  • Experience of collaborating with behavioural scientists, data scientists and technical teams within highly ambiguous environments
  • Experience of working with third-party developers, start-ups and other API partners to design propositions
  • Curiosity to adopt new approaches to product development including behavioural science and data analytics
  • Good understanding of the use of open APIs and microservices to create unique customer experiences
  • Adept at guiding teams of colleagues, partners, and start-ups towards a uniting vision
  • Confidence in understanding the commercial drivers of a business
  • Believes in team over self and seeks to create a culture of security and candor to motivate, develop and ultimately empower people to succeed
  • Self-starter with a desire to take initiative

Salary, Benefits And Work-Life Balance

We do not have a set salary for this position, as it will be dependent on the successful candidates experience. We are happy to see CVs from all candidates who meet the requirements, and will be happy to discuss the remuneration package.

At Admiral, we are proud to be a diverse business where we put our people and customers first. We have great benefits to ensure employees have a great work-life balance; it’s one of the reasons we’re voted no. 1 in the 2019 Sunday Times Best Big Companies to Work For in the UK. We want you to have an element of freedom to define a working lifestyle that supports this, so accommodate flexible hours wherever possible.

If you have any queries about this position, please contact the Recruitment Officer looking after this position – Jessica.SUTTON2@admiralgroup.co.uk.