Senior Service Designer

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Senior Service Designer

Company: UBDS Group

Location: Manchester, England, United Kingdom

Job Type: Full-Time

Category: Service Design / GTM Operations

Date Posted: 2026-05-29

Experience Level: Mid-Senior Level (5-10 years)

Remote Status: Hybrid (with remote flexibility)

🚀 Role Summary

• Lead complex public sector service design discovery initiatives, ensuring alignment with GDS (Government Digital Service) standards and the full service lifecycle (Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live).

• Apply a robust systems-thinking approach to map and analyze intricate interactions between users, policy, legislation, operational processes, and technology.

• Synthesize diverse research and evidence into actionable insights and clear design principles to drive meaningful and sustainable service improvements for citizens and organizations.

• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration and strategic sense-making sessions with multidisciplinary teams and senior policy stakeholders to build shared understanding and drive consensus.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role is positioned within the GTM (Go-To-Market) operations sphere, specifically focusing on the strategic design and optimization of public sector services. While not a traditional sales or marketing operations role, the principles of understanding user needs, process optimization, and driving adoption of improved services are core to GTM success. The emphasis on GDS standards and public sector context suggests a strong focus on operational efficiency, policy implementation, and citizen experience, which are critical for successful service delivery and adoption.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end service design discovery within UK public sector environments, ensuring adherence to GDS standards and navigating service lifecycle phases.

• Employ systems thinking to map and understand the complex interplay of users, policy, legislation, operational processes, technology, and governance structures.

• Synthesize research, data, and evidence into clear, actionable insights, identifying opportunity areas and defining key design considerations for service improvement.

• Define and champion service design principles that guide the creation of improved service outcomes, ensuring they are user-centric and operationally feasible.

• Identify and articulate unmet user needs, friction points, and structural barriers within complex service ecosystems to inform strategic interventions.

• Facilitate impactful collaborative workshops and structured sense-making sessions involving multidisciplinary teams and policy stakeholders.

• Ensure all service design recommendations are grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the UK legal and regulatory framework.

• Produce high-quality, impactful artefacts including service maps, ecosystem maps, problem statements, design principles, and strategic recommendations to support decision-making.

• Provide support to teams navigating governance and service assessment processes, ensuring design considerations are integrated effectively.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities emphasize a strong focus on the "discovery" phase of service design, which is critical for understanding the foundational elements of a service before implementation. This aligns with operations' need to establish clear processes, understand constraints, and define measurable outcomes before scaling. The mention of "operational processes" and "governance" directly links this role to operational efficiency and compliance.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education: While no specific degree is listed, a background in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Public Policy, Business Administration, or a related field