Service Innovation Leader (Service Designer)

This occupation is found in the private, public and third sector, local, national, and multinational organisations and employers. Relevant sectors include the health sector, finance sector, business and professional services, retail sector, technology sector, government, public sector, and the charity sector. There has been a growing demand for service design skills to be embedded within culture and governance structures to support future ways of working.

The broad purpose of the occupation is to improve/redesign services currently offered or develop/design new service propositions to meet the needs of the user as well as the business and other stakeholders. Service designers take a user-centred, collaborative and exploratory approach to design the new service, iterating toward implementation.

In their daily work, an employee in this occupation interacts with a wide range of internal stakeholders, from front-line staff to service managers, senior leaders to heads of the organisation. If involved in the research, they also interact with a range of external stakeholders, which may include members of the public and individuals working in other organisations. They may, in large organisations, report to programme boards and to shareholders in private sector organisations. They often work in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams (through formal or informal arrangement) which may include marketing, finance, communications, logistics, project management, HR, digital (developers, systems/solutions architects) and user research.

Service Designers are responsible for guiding, leading, facilitating and educating those involved in the (re)design, providing adequate challenge to ensure that they are responding to the right problem statement, that the scope of the work is appropriately sized and the limitations (i.e. with technology or the outcome an organisation wants to achieve) are understood to ensure anything (re)designed is viable.