Lead Designer
Job description
This role is open to those interested in working across both service and interaction design, with particular focus on service design.
Please note: We anticipate a high volume of applications for this role, so may close applications early. We encourage putting your application in (mainly CV) as soon as you can.
Lead Designers at Made Tech are specialists in their design discipline(s). In this case, we’re looking for an expert practitioner 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.
Please note: We anticipate a high volume of applications for this role, so may close applications early. We encourage putting your application in (mainly CV) as soon as you can.
Lead Designers at Made Tech are specialists in their design discipline(s). In this case, we’re looking for an expert practitioner 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.
About the role
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:
Lead Designers at Made Tech:
- Are expert practitioners
- Take the initiative and are fully responsible for their own outcomes
- Responsible for overall interaction and service design outcomes of engagements
- Highly accountable
- Have a growth mindset
- Candid-but-kind communicators
To see these in more detail, please see our detail job description in our handbook.
Key responsibilities
Scope
- 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).
Skills, knowledge and expertise
At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about Made Tech and the job opportunity. Even if you don't feel that you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Get in touch with our talent team if you’d like an informal chat about the role and your suitability before applying.
Security Clearance
An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we're ideally looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility.
Security Clearance
An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we're ideally looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility.
Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' UK residency and 5 year' employment history (or back to full-time education).
Support in applying
If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email talent@madetech.com.
We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.
When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a member of our talent team who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. We’ve put together this blog as a resource to share more about reasonable adjustments and some examples of what this could include. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.
Life at Made Tech
We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice).
Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the Made Tech talent team know.
Job benefits
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
- 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
How we hire
Our hiring process is designed to be thorough, transparent, and supportive, guiding candidates through each step. The exact process may vary slightly depending on the role but these are the typical steps candidates can expect.
We’ll keep you updated throughout the process and provide helpful feedback at each stage. No matter the outcome, we make sure the feedback is useful and supportive, so you feel informed and can learn from the experience.
Our talent team will review all applications, and while we may use AI to help speed up the process, a real human will always make the final decisions. Once reviewed, shortlisted applicants will be invited to a screening.
This is a 25-30 minute call with someone in our talent team who is hiring for the role.
Once screenings have taken place the hiring manager will review the shortlist and invites to interview will be sent.
You may then be invited to an initial virtual interview which is usually with the hiring manager or a couple of members from the team. This is usually around 45 – 60 minutes and the format may vary depending on the role.
If you progress, you’ll be invited to a final stage interview which is usually with two members of the team. The format varies depending on the role and this is usually an hour.
Final conversation with one of our exec members.
Not quite right?
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