Service Designer

We believe in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future in a technology-driven world.

As strategies, technologies and innovation collide, we create opportunity from complexity.

Our diverse teams of experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough use of technologies to progress further, faster. Our clients adapt and transform, and together we achieve enduring results.

An innovation and transformation consultancy, we are over 3,200 specialists in consumer, defence and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government, health and life sciences, manufacturing, and transport. Our people are strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers and technologists. We operate globally from offices across the UK, US, Europe, and the Nordics.

Bringing Ingenuity to Life.

We do this, as part of inclusive, agile, multi-discipline teams of specialists – designers, engineers, and all manner of technical subject matter experts (cybercrime, circular economy, manufacturing automation, cryptocurrency, food science, etc…) – to transform our client’s businesses at internet scale.

We practice and advocate for modern working techniques - Human-Centred Design, agile product culture, minimum viable bureaucracy, Cloud-native, data-fuelled, etc. etc. – for modern digital business.

This is a senior specialist practitioner role - you’ll spend your time on client projects, often deeply immersed in a small number of projects, contributing your expertise and leading more junior specialist practitioners. More senior roles have sales targets. This one does not, but you will play a role in growing client relationships and winning work.

The role includes:

• With clients and colleagues, design and deliver strategic approaches to projects and problems - defining engagement model, project approach, service design activities, tasks, deliverables, etc. and explain them convincingly to clients and collaborators
• Design and lead:
  • Customer/user research and insight, market research, and stakeholder engagement and evangelism – to uncover and articulate opportunity
  • Design thinking, vision and innovation workshop activities, and co-creation sessions – to visualise and express the vision for the transformed front-stage experience
  • Operational and capability change planning, and roadmap making – to plan the transformed back-stage-and-behind-the-scenes organisation (capabilities, structure, operating model, culture, etc.), and plan and mobilise the activities to deliver and implement it
  • Business-case or case-for-change activities - to size, prioritise and justify the change
• Establish your own relationships with key clients. Contribute to business development by helping to identify and define opportunity with existing clients, and assist with pitches and bids to new and existing clients.
• When leading other Service Designers (or audience researchers, or content designers, or UI/UX designers, etc.), set clear expectations about quality of strategic output. Coach teams and contributors to exceed those expectations, ensuring the resulting strategies are realisable
• Model behaviours that create the best project experience and outcomes for all participants, in high-performing teams. Set and manage clear expectations for these behaviours and coach individuals/teams to exceed them.

Key skills you’ll need to be successful in this role:

• Service design, experience mapping, customer research and testing, workshop design and facilitation, business design, organisation change, system thinking, roadmap creation, horizon-scanning, analysis and consulting
• Forming and proposing early hypotheses, as a starting point to collaborative iteration (happy being publicly wrong too)
• Collaboration - reconciling differences and opposing views; challenging and refining together, seeking and offering feedback, seeking counter-opinions
• Using impactful storytelling and visualisation techniques, backed by data, to explain, evangelise and persuade in formal pressured settings (in writing and presentations) to large senior audiences.

The personal attributes we’d expect for someone to be successful in this role are:

• Confident, articulate and persuasive – clear thinking, crisp argument, summarises well, tells good stories backed with robust detail and data
• Imaginative, innovative, creative, curious – enjoys generating ideas, novel directions, solving complex problems, entering new territory, uncovering, probing, digging into the detail
• Able to have full and frank conversations – sensitive and robust in equal measure
• Ambitious for the quality and impact of the work, and for the performance of the team
• Warm – matches depth of expertise with genuine approachable friendliness and integrity to build high-trust relationships and foster an environment of inclusivity and psychological safety

Benefits at PA:

• Private medical insurance
• Travel allowance
• 25 days annual leave with the opportunity to buy 5 additional days
• Company pension scheme
• Annual performance-based bonus
• Life and Income protection insurance
• Tax efficient benefits (cycle to work, give as you earn)
• Additional optional benefits (Dental, critical illness, spouse/partner life assurance)

PA is committed to building an inclusive and supportive culture where diversity thrives, and all of our people can excel. We believe that greater diversity stimulates innovation, enabling us to fulfil our purpose of ‘Bringing Ingenuity to Life’, supporting the growth of our people, and delivering more enduring results for our clients.

We only recruit, promote and reward our people based on their contribution, without regard to gender, race, disability, religion, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or marital status.

We welcome international applications, but we are unable to offer sponsorship for work permits, so you will need to have the full right to live and work in the UK. Unfortunately, your application will be automatically rejected if you do not have these rights.