Lead Designer

Made Tech wants to positively impact the country's future by using technology to improve society. We believe being design-led can create positive outcomes in the public sector through critical services enabled by technology. We’ve built a community of designers and researchers to support the public sector's growing demand for a design-led approach to service delivery.

Lead Designers at Made Tech are specialists in their design discipline(s). In this case, we’re looking for an expert practitioner in Interaction and Service Design who is able to coach, mentor and lead other designers within the Interaction and Service Design discipline at Made Tech. Success in this role means guiding the work of other designers within the Interaction and Service Design discipline to deliver positive outcomes.

Key responsibilities

• Responsible to the Head of Interaction and Service Design or a UCD Principal
• Hands-on design and design leadership for products and teams to assure the successful design and delivery of public services through technology
• Acts as an interaction-and-service-design subject matter expert, facilitating the design process and communicating design decisions to teams and setting expectations with stakeholders
• Takes an active role in the Service and Interaction Design community, leading on, developing, and sharing good practice
• Influencing team shapes to balance profit, utilisation and client needs at all stages of delivery (Bid stage, project initiation, with ongoing regular review) and iteration)
• Actively supports retention, hiring, and team quality
• Mentoring and coaching within the design community and line management of other designers

Practice

• Create a shared understanding of problems to solve and ideas to test
• Make things real through storytelling and uncovering the ‘why’
• Caring about design enough to make sure everyone can use public services
• Make use of the Made Tech playbooks where they exist and support their development
• Make public services simple to explain, understand, and use by removing unnecessary complexity and keeping designs focused on creating positive outcomes for people and society.

Leading teams

• Assure the quality of design delivery across multiple teams.
• Raise and manage delivery risks to prevent them becoming issues using clear mitigation and management plans
• Introduce good habits for sharing and improving design work into teams.

Community

• Line management of designers
• Support the hiring and onboarding of designers (contract and permanent)
• Help define Made Tech design principles through delivering effective public services
• Represent and advocate for user-centred design publicly and internally

Sales

• Build relationships with clients, earning their trust and understanding their needs
• Support the sales team to win new work by contributing and reviewing bids relating to UCD
• Contribute to marketing materials (blogs, case studies, talks).

Key Measures

• Case studies of how to design and deliver good public services and outcomes
• Contributing to the growth and happiness of the UCD community at Made Tech
• Deliver your project objectives on time and to the expected standard
• Display the Made Tech values and behaviours reflected in feedback from colleagues and clients
• Ensure your team members (direct reports and account team members) feel fully supported and engaged - provision of regular 1:1s, an effective cascade of information and progression of development plans.

Behaviours

• Client Focus - a need to put the most compelling offer possible in front of the client
• Drive to Deliver - able to take ownership of the response, pushing it through the business inside the timeframes that we have been given.
• Learning and Mentoring - an appetite to grow fast and learn while passing on your own experience to your teams and colleagues
• One team - contributing to the ongoing improvement of the function at Made Tech, sharing experiences and successes as well as learning points.

Skills, knowledge and expertise

• Able to develop new and novel approaches to highly complex design challenges, based on fundamental interaction and service design principles
• Act as a leader and advocate for the Interaction and Service Design practice internally and externally. Able to coach and mentor others, and define the interaction and service design standards which others will apply. Influences the organisation, clients, partners and peers on the contribution of interaction and service design
• Develop a wide breadth of knowledge across the industry or business
• Work is often self-initiated. Able to define an approach from first principles, and propose alternative ways to deliver
• Fully responsible for meeting objectives on an engagement
• Understand the relationship between interaction and service design, other disciplines, and wider client organisational requirements
• Defines what ‘good’ interaction and service design looks like on an engagement, enabling and holding others to account for producing high quality outputs and deliverables
• Establish milestones and have a significant role in the assignment of tasks and/or responsibilities Makes decisions which impact the success of assigned work, i.e. results, deadlines and budget
• Lead on user and client collaboration throughout all stages of work. Ensures users’ needs are met consistently through each work stage.

Job benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays

• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work

• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options

• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff

• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice

If successful, you will be required to undertake an SC clearance