Lead Service Designer

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways.

Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.

Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.

Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission. The team have been nominated four times in a row for Best Public Sector Employer at the Women in Tech awards and won the award in 2025!

As a Lead Service Designer at DBT you will identify gaps and opportunities in existing services as well as look for opportunities to create new ones. Working in a user centred multidisciplinary team alongside researchers, developers, and other designers, youll bring a wide view of the landscape as well as be the voice of the user and business. You'll collaborate with product managers and service owners to help understand and communicate the complexities of our services. 

You will create visions, strategies, and roadmaps to help guide teams and stakeholders while documenting holistic user journeys to communicate and help make and understand key decisions. Were looking for someone who will be able to analyse existing services to understand pain and failure points as well as actively promoting good design rational with the team and to stakeholders to ensure quality outcomes.

To be effective in this position, you will need to understand the needs of users and stakeholders and be able to communicate this in an engaging way, whether this is by creating prototypes to test an idea and inspire the team and stakeholders or creating design patterns that can be used across our services to ensure consistency and scalability.

Key Responsibilities

• Understand and advocate for user needs, ensuring services are designed to meet them. Lead communication with colleagues across DBT to define user journeys and articulate product visions.

• Engage and manage stakeholder needs, driving the communication of insights and strategies to senior stakeholders and management.

• Track user interactions across boundaries, create user journeys to highlight pain points and improvements, and design systems across multiple services, ensuring simple and evidence-based outcomes.

• Demonstrate expertise in service design, helping others understand its value, and lead evidence-based design direction. Create high-quality deliverables like personas, experience maps, and service blueprints.

• Lead on the analysis of research findings, identify improvement opportunities, and communicate design solutions that address user needs and business outcomes and use prototyping methods to share ideas with real users and encourage collaboration.

• Bring the team and stakeholders along the journey, ensuring feedback is incorporated, and act as an authority on service design, managing, training, and mentoring other designers, leading the capability and promotion of service design within the department and across government.

• Identify cost-saving opportunities while implementing best practice service design, promoting best practice and build a collaborative culture within the Service Design team.

It is essential that you have:

• Strong experience in Service Design - designing and leading end-to-end services, using a deep understanding of user needs to shape service direction and outcomes (LEAD) 

• Able to identify complex problems across services and develop practical, user-centred solutions that balance user needs, business goals and constraints 

• Experience working in agile, multidisciplinary teams, collaborating with roles such as user researchers and business analysts to deliver iterative design 

• Experience leading, coaching and mentoring others in service design, helping to build capability and improve ways of working across teams 

• Strong stakeholder management skills, with experience building trusted relationships and influencing senior stakeholders to embed user-centred design in decisions and strategy 

• Experience using data, research and service performance insights to inform decisions and drive continuous improvement across services 

• Experience championing accessible and inclusive design, ensuring services work for all users and across the full end-to-end journey