Experience Lead

Are you ready to make an impact in one of the UK's most dynamic and transformative public sector organisations? We are recruiting for the role of Experience Lead within the in-house digital product and services department of a groundbreaking public sector entity that's reshaping the way public services are delivered.

The Role: Experience Lead (Maternity cover)

As an Experience Lead, you will spearhead design across the organisation’s digital estate, playing a pivotal role in the redesign of complex, interdependent services. You'll work openly and collaboratively, always keeping the user at the center of everything you do. Your work will span multiple teams and all service channels, ensuring a seamless and user-centric approach.

The role will lead product and content design and the development of design systems, fostering a culture and new ways of working within multidisciplinary teams. This will enable a radical shift in our ability to solve complex social and economic challenges. You will serve as a senior advisor across multiple teams and focus areas within the organisation.

You will be expected to build strong relationships with key stakeholders, providing leadership and influence. Your responsibilities will include forward planning to future-proof our design work by developing processes that enable rapid development of high-quality solutions. Additionally, you will oversee budgeting, estimating, planning, and objective setting for the digital design team.

You will collaborate with strategy and policy design teams to enhance the organisation's capability to work in design-led ways. This involves coaching and supporting staff to build on their existing strengths and develop their practice. Working with other teams within the Digital and Data Service, you will identify key priorities and expertise required to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of work.

The successful applicant will design and lead major programmes that drive a significant step change in achieving the organisation’s ambitions. In this role, you will lead a team of professional designers (content and product) as well as user researchers. You will work closely with other design leaders across the business to transform the organisation’s approach to policy and service development, ensuring that citizens’ needs remain at the heart of our efforts.

Responsibilities:

• You will lead major programmes of work that support our vision for a 21st century council that delivers on our digital strategy. This role will build teams that help drive design thinking across the organisation and developing and embedding its ways of working.
• You will have overall accountability for setting strategic vision and direction for design and managing design standards across the digital estate.
• You will have an understanding and experience of managing a Design System with the relevant governance.
• You will lead on implementing a Design System to provide a single source of truth for components, patterns, and styles that unify disjointed experiences so that they are visually cohesive and appear to be part of the same ecosystem.
• You will have a clear track record for translating strategic thinking into programmes of work that make a difference on the ground.
• Managing stakeholders; influencing and shaping stakeholders’ objectives. Working with senior leaders to support a future vision and priorities for a service transformation or new service development.
• You will build a design team: hire team members, set standards of practice and behaviour based on modern industry standards and your experience; run events and give development opportunities; line manage members of staff; manage budgets estimating, planning and objective setting.
• You will lead team performance and take an interest in your team’s career development. Working with other members of multidisciplinary teams, you will specify and design end-to-end digital services for our most complex and interdependent services: helping to define user needs, business objectives, scope, constraints, evaluation and prioritisation of user stories and identification and mitigation of design challenges.
• You will have direct responsibility for working as part of a multidisciplinary team to identify, understand and validate through prototyping, opportunities for new and amended products, services and technologies.
• You will champion design as key to transformation, you will be building relationships with leaders and teams to explain the benefits of user-centred design, helping service areas to map and see opportunities to transform their areas and coaching them to build ambitious plans.
• You will be mapping service and user journeys, helping services understand opportunities to transform; prototyping and wireframing interactions to help design new services.

About you

To excel in this role, you will be a highly experienced designer with significant industry experience in leading complex developments and large teams.

You will have a deep understanding of design principles, practices and methods of product development, frameworks and principles.

This will be supported by:

Knowledge

• Influencing, persuasion, communication

• Data and evidence-driven decision making

• Knowledge of modern technology, including cloud technology, architecture, agile delivery methods and software practices

• Understanding user research principles and benefits

• Knowledge of the cross-government DDAT framework

• Knowledge of systems thinking

• Understanding the history of service design

• Coaching and mentoring

Skills and abilities

• Ability to guide design decisions for complex product and service areas, helping senior stakeholders see opportunities and leading process change and plotting a path forward

• Adept at building high-performing design teams

The ability to understand technical complexity and risks, run collaborative design activities, influence senior leaders and others.

• Ability to manage risk, and explain the trade-off between complex risk factors to find simple ways forward

• Relentless user focus, with the ability to contribute to user research and the translation of user feedback into design decisions

• Desire to take an active part in the cross-government digital and design community.

Ability to coach teams in agile ways of working

People Management:

• Building and leading the design team within products and services; hiring a diverse team; setting behavioural standards and good practice; taking responsibility for professional development of the design team and managing performance robustly

• Line management of 9 professionals including content designers, product designers and site producers.

• Support more junior members of the team to set the direction of our products and lead colleagues to deliver product strategies Experience

• Experience working in multidisciplinary teams to design, build and improve digital products and services of which they are a critical part

• Experience delivering prototype interactions against time constraints to help unlock creative thinking in a team

• Proven experience of building positive relationships with a range of both internal and external stakeholders

• Experience coaching people in a non-agile organisation on how to embrace design and user focus

• Experience leading design teams to help an organisation understand and solve large, complex problems

On offer is a competitive salary, one of the best pension schemes available, and a highly flexible working model that champions work/life balance, including hybrid working (2 days in the office per week). You will have the opportunity to be part of one of the most ambitious, pioneering, and intellectually challenging places to work in local government.

Apply now and join the team in driving the organisation's transformation and playing a key role in shaping its future.