Senior Service Designer
Location: remote. This role can be based at any of Barnardo’s national offices. Regular local and national travel will be required.
Help us design services that transform childhoods
At Barnardo’s, we believe every child deserves a safe, happy, and hopeful future. For over 150 years, we’ve been innovating to improve the lives of children, young people, and families across the UK. Today, we run more than 800 services and are committed to making them excellent, inclusive, and designed with the children, young people and families who use them.
As a senior member of the Service Design team, you will play a vital role in applying service design methods to deliver measurable improvements in service quality, efficiency, value, and outcomes for children, young people, and families. This role offers the opportunity to shape not only individual services, but how service design is used to support decision‑making, prioritisation, and innovation across the organisation.
This is a hands‑on role as well as a strategic one – you’ll be actively designing, prototyping, and iterating services while also shaping direction and decision‑making.
Responsibilities
- Work across a portfolio of projects, balancing priorities and adapting to changing organisational needs
- Contribute to service development and proposals, working with business development colleagues to shape service models
- Influence decision‑making and prioritisation, using evidence and insight to guide direction
- Identify opportunities to improve services in ways that deliver better outcomes, greater efficiency, and value for money
- Lead the end‑to‑end design of services in complex environments, shaping user‑centred, evidence‑based solutions that respond to organisational priorities, and creating service maps, blueprints, prototypes, and other design artefacts to bring ideas to life
- Test and iterate service concepts in response to feedback and learning, refining solutions to improve outcomes
- Ensure services are coherent and integrated across online and offline channels
- Work across functions – including business development, digital, finance, operations, research and policy – to engage stakeholders and support organisational change
- Mentor and support colleagues – developing confidence and skills, with the potential to provide line management support to junior designers where appropriate
- Develop practice and contribute to standards, frameworks, and reusable design patterns
- Share learning internally and externally, contributing to professional communities of practice and helping raise the profile of service design at Barnardo’s
Qualifications
- Work autonomously to lead the design of complex services
- Manage competing priorities effectively across projects, balancing time, focus, and trade‑offs
- Influence stakeholders and support organisational change beyond immediate project teams, communicating design decisions and complex ideas clearly to a range of audiences
- Understand how services operate within wider organisational systems, and use this to inform decision‑making and support effective change
- Confidently use a range of evidence, including user research, service data, and performance insights, to inform decisions and guide direction
- Conduct in‑depth user research to generate actionable insights and guide decision‑making
- Create and iterate prototypes and other design artefacts
- Integrate offline and online service delivery into coherent end‑to‑end services
- Design and facilitate collaborative workshops with a range of stakeholders and partners
- Evaluate and evidence the impact of service design work
- Previous experience in children’s services, health, education or related public/third sector contexts is desirable – but transferable skills are encouraged
Benefits
- 26 days annual leave (rising with service) plus bank holidays
- Access to the Barnardo’s pension scheme
- Flexible working and hybrid/remote options
- Wellbeing initiatives and Employee Assistance Programme
- Regular supervision and career development opportunities
- The opportunity to shape how service design is used across a national organisation
- The chance to work on services that support children, young people and families across the UK
Inclusion and Belonging
We are committed to building a diverse workforce. We particularly welcome applications from disabled candidates, LGBTQ+ people, people from racially minoritised communities, and those with care experience. If there’s anything we can do to support you through the application process, please let us know.
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