Senior Manager - Service Design

Senior Service Design Manager

London, hybrid

We’re hiring a Senior Service Design Manager to lead meaningful, complex transformation projects within a large, global professional services organisation.

Sitting within a growing internal digital experience and design function, this role will work across strategic initiatives spanning business service transformation, digital culture and enablement, GenAI experimentation, internal platforms, technology adoption and client facing service innovation.

This is a highly hands on role, combining service design, user research, insight generation, prototyping and strategic thinking. You’ll work closely with senior stakeholders, technology and development teams, transformation specialists, data leads and change professionals to understand complex problems, identify opportunities and turn insights into practical recommendations and services.

You’ll have the opportunity to shape how the organisation approaches design and innovation, from developing AI roadmaps for business divisions and assessing emerging technology, through to redesigning internal services, creating design systems and running experimentation programmes to understand where GenAI and other technologies can genuinely add value.

What You’ll Be Doing

Service Design & Transformation

• Lead discovery, research and service design across major strategic initiatives spanning digital, data, technology, AI and business transformation.
• Design, implement and recommend technology enabled tools and services that solve genuine user and business problems.
• Review existing end to end services, identifying pain points, opportunities and areas for improvement.
• Translate complex business challenges into clear service concepts, recommendations and practical solutions.
• Bring the user perspective into strategy, roadmaps, investment decisions and technology choices.

Research, Insights & Evidence

• Build an insights engine that creates reusable findings and evidence that can inform a range of strategic and operational decisions.
• Develop evidence bases that help the organisation understand what to invest in, what to change and where emerging technologies can add value.
• Design and run workshops with key clients, users and senior stakeholders to uncover needs and create solutions.
• Use research and design evidence to challenge assumptions and influence strategic direction.
• Develop appropriate approaches to user testing and validation depending on the problem, audience and stage of development.

AI, Technology & Innovation

• Support AI roadmaps and GenAI initiatives across different services divisions.
• Explore emerging technologies and conduct market scanning to understand what is available and where it could provide genuine value.
• Assess whether new tools or technologies are worth bringing into the organisation, developing recommendations based on user needs, evidence and experimentation.
• Work with development and technology teams to experiment with GenAI and emerging digital capabilities.
• Support experimentation programmes designed to generate learning rather than simply deliver a predetermined solution.
• Help the organisation understand how technology can improve services while keeping user needs at the centre.

Design & Prototyping

• Contribute to the development and adoption of a design system, helping standardise digital design across products and services.
• Help establish and manage a backlog of design work in partnership with product and development teams.
• Ensure design thinking continues through implementation rather than stopping at the strategy or discovery stage.

Stakeholder & Cross functional Leadership

• Facilitate workshops, discovery sprints and co design sessions with senior stakeholders and clients.
• Present recommendations with clarity and gravitas, influencing strategy, investment and organisational direction.
• Work alongside change managers and product owners to bring new services and ways of working to life.
• Influence without relying on formal authority, bringing people together around evidence, user needs and a shared outcome.

Design Capability & Community

• Champion service design as both a craft and a mindset across the organisation.
• Help build design maturity and embed user centred design into how the organisation thinks, plans and delivers.
• Support training, coaching and capability development across the wider organisation.
• Contribute to a community of user centred design, sharing approaches, standards, research and best practice.
• Depending on seniority, help lead a multidisciplinary design team of approximately 6–7 people, covering a range of design capabilities.
• Help shape the future structure, capability and ways of working of the design function.

What You’ll Bring

• Extensive experience in service design with a proven track record of designing and improving end to end services within a professional services or highly regulated environment
• The ability to navigate environments where there are multiple stakeholders, competing priorities and significant organisational nuance.
• Experience working on digital transformation, technology enabled services and/or GenAI initiatives.
• Experience assessing technology or digital tools and making evidence based recommendations around adoption, investment and implementation.
• Confidence facilitating workshops and co design sessions with senior stakeholders, users and clients.
• Strong prototyping and experimentation skills, with the ability to move from an ambiguous problem through to a tested service concept.
• Experience working with product, technology, development, data and change teams.
• The gravitas and communication skills to present recommendations that influence strategy, investment and direction.
• Strong stakeholder management skills and the emotional intelligence to build trust quickly.
• A genuine interest in emerging technology, AI and how these can be applied to improve services.

The ideal candidate will be a strategic thinker who is still a practitioner.

You’ll be comfortable discussing strategy and AI roadmaps with senior leadership in the morning, running a discovery workshop with users in the afternoon, and working alongside developers to prototype a solution the next day.

You won’t simply be designing interfaces. You’ll be understanding complex systems, generating evidence, challenging assumptions, shaping services and helping the organisation make better decisions about people, processes and technology.

Experience in professional services or the public sector would be particularly relevant, as the organisation operates in an environment where complexity, nuance, stakeholder management and trust are critical.

This is an opportunity for someone who wants to help build the next generation of user centred design within a global professional services organisation, while remaining close enough to the work to actually design, research, prototype and experiment themselves.

If you feel you have the skills and experience to do the above, please apply now or send your CV to jordan@echo-talent.com