Lead Service Designer

As a Lead Service Designer, you’ll shape the future of Universal Credit by aligning emerging policy and business strategy with user needs. Working closely with Lead Product Managers and the Product Strategy team, you’ll help evolve the service to better support millions of users.

You’ll champion collaboration across digital, policy, legal and other teams, ensuring services are designed with people at the heart. You’ll be a confident facilitator and expert practitioner, advocating for user-centred design and driving improvements that deliver real outcomes.

What you’ll do:

• Lead service design for Universal Credit, aligning user needs with departmental objectives, policy outcomes and product strategy.
• lead and facilitate collaboration across teams and programmes to define and evidence led service design concepts.
• Engage senior stakeholders and influence decision-making and alignment at programme and departmental level.
• Produce high-quality service design artefacts to communicate your approaches, ideas and recommendations. .
• Promote best practice and build a strong, open design culture across the teams you work with.
• Mentor designers and support capability building within the service design community.
• Contribute to recruitment and development of the DWP Service design team.

This is a leadership role where you’ll set direction, guide teams and help embed service design across the organisation. If you’re passionate about designing services that truly meet people’s needs, we’d love to hear from you.

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:

• Lead criterion: Have significant experience of hands-on service design.
• Provide leadership and expertise to develop end-to-end, front-to-back services using wider Government principles and evidence that meet citizen and colleague needs as well as department objectives.
• Be comfortable influencing and communicating to a wide range of senior and other stakeholders on the value of user centricity, your strategies, approaches and decisions.
• Lead on the creation and maintenance of a positive and collaborative working environment across departmental and cross-government boundaries.