Lead Service Designer

About the role.

You’ll sit alongside a passionate and talented multi-disciplinary experience design team, made up of user researchers, product designers, content designers and design operations, who are focused on creating the best digital experiences for Bupa’s customers in the UK.

As an experienced design lead you will have deep domain expertise across service and product design. You will lead projects, establish service design at Bupa and mentor other team members. You will work collaboratively in an agile environment to create positive experiences that are easy to use and balance the needs of Bupa’s customers with its business goals. You will also build strong relationships with senior stakeholders, collaborators and other design team members.

You will line manage a group of designers and provide mentorship and support to facilitate development, encourage growth and foster a culture of care and candour.

What will you be doing?

• You will have strong service design skills, paired with product design skills/background. You will identify and solve customer and business problems, using service design, design thinking and product design approaches and methods.
• You’ll provide direction and set the standard for service design across products and services at Bupa to improve the customer experience.
• Support and inspire others in the team, up-skilling and training them in service design thinking and methods.
• Generate concepts, proposals and plans for new service propositions, or to evolve and improve existing services.
• As an experienced voice of the customer you’ll build advocacy amongst key stakeholders – evangelising the principles and processes of service design.

• You will be confident leading large projects or programmes of work and task managing people within those projects.
• You will lead playbacks, support in design crits and other communities of practice sessions to highlight your discipline’s work, enable constructive feedback and elevate the quality of the craft.
• Helping to maintain and improve the inherent pillars of our team’s culture; psychological safety, celebrating success, and learning from each other.
• Confident mediation across the demands of a business, the needs of the customer and the feasibility of the tech stack to design the right thing and design the thing right.

Who are we looking for?

• Service design mindset – when approaching a problem you take a wide view, looking front and backstage, and end to end by default. You are then able to identify specific areas of opportunity for more detailed analysis, both strategic (supporting commercial goals, balancing feasibility with desirability) and user-focussed, ensuring a human-centred approach.
• Experience creating customer journey maps, service blueprints, flows and more – paired with an understanding of when to use each method to understand and improve a specific situation.
• You are very comfortable working alongside researchers analysing and synthesising research work, uncovering insights from both qualitative and quantitative research.
• You can navigate a complex business and its journeys across multiple channels. You are then able to communicate what matters most to our customers, colleagues, internal teams and business.
• A strong facilitator who can bring together and engage others in your service design work in workshops and collaborative sessions. Adept at planning, structuring and facilitating cross-discipline workshops with attendees of varying levels of seniority.
• A champion of the customer throughout whilst staying in touch with the business requirements.
• You set the standard for your peers and the organisation.
• Established ‘design thinker’ with empathy for user needs, a willingness to explore ideas and implement a ‘test and learn’ approach before launch.
• A great storyteller capable of influencing and encouraging stakeholders and peers to adopt and buy into something that was previously unfamiliar.
• Accustomed to working in an FCA regulated business is a bonus.
• Adept in managing complexity across multiple streams of work.
• Knowledgeable across our toolkit that includes Figma and UserTesting.com
• A champion for accessibility who acknowledges the needs of users with different backgrounds, abilities, cultures, and environments.
• A motivator of peers and the ongoing progression of their craft, while identifying new ways to develop skills to keep up with marketplace, industry and technology trends.