Are you passionate about designing end‑to‑end services that make a real difference for diverse user needs?
Join The Open University as a Senior Service Designer and play a pivotal role in shaping inclusive, accessible, and coherent services across one of the UK's most complex and impactful organisations. You'll lead service design work across multi‑channel services, working from discovery through to live operations, while helping to mature our service‑oriented approach and design community.
About the Role
As a Senior Service Designer, you will play a key role in embedding service design practice, leading work across complex service areas, and developing junior designers. You will work strategically to reduce complexity, improve service outcomes, and build design capability across the organisation.
You will play a key role in maturing the OU's Design community and service-led approach. This role offers opportunities to lead complex, strategic work while developing junior designers and shaping organizational practice.
Key Responsibilities
Lead service design work across complex service areas with a strategic and holistic mindset, working from discovery through to live operations.
Define service scope based on user needs, working end-to-end across all channels (digital, phone, post, face-to-face) and ensuring coherent experiences.
Create space and the right conditions for good service design within product teams and across service areas, enabling designers and teams to do their best work.
Lead multi-disciplinary teams to design user-centred services that reduce complexity and improve outcomes, engaging Product, Engineering, Content, Research and Operations colleagues.
Use advanced techniques to articulate problem statements and relate them to business value through clear outcomes, KPIs and cost-to-serve measures.
Lead and coach junior designers in service design practice and strategic thinking, providing structured feedback and development support.
Identify opportunities for cost reduction and service improvement, making evidence-based recommendations for stopping, continuing or scaling work.
Lead the design and iteration of common components and service patterns to improve reuse, consistency, accessibility and usability across services.
Establish processes to share knowledge and ensure designs are reusable and consistent with the GOV.UK Service Standard, accessibility requirements and OU design standards.
Negotiate, plan and deliver service design work across teams, managing both planned and unplanned work while balancing strategic and operational needs.
Communicate service strategy, designs and decisions effectively to diverse audiences including senior stakeholders, building and presenting compelling cases.
Champion accessibility, inclusion and security across all service design work, ensuring services work for users with diverse needs and lowest digital access.
Be an ambassador of the Service Design community of practice, contributing to collective knowledge and helping to make service design more consistent.
Key Capabilities
Lead service design for journey slices, sequencing work (now/next/later), aligning people, budget and dependencies, and securing go/no-go decisions.
Run governance cadences (packs, stage gates, decision meetings) that reduce rework across squads and surface risks early.
Make decisions evidence-ready by agreeing baselines and targets, linking data and probes to decision points, and using results to adjust course.
Identify capacity and capability gaps in teams, working with leadership to fill them and create opportunities for learning and development.
Embed accessibility, inclusion and security requirements into definitions of 'done' and acceptance criteria.
Set experiment strategies for service areas, determining what to test, when, and with whom, building reusable test assets.
Create map & metrics views that decision-makers use to prioritise work, linking service metrics to OKRs and showing early movement.
Author or update service patterns, socialise them and track adoption, preventing one-off solutions by anchoring work to standards.
Represent service design at internal events and increasingly at external events, building profile and sharing OU practice.
About You
Education: A degree in Design, Service Design or related field, or equivalent extensive professional experience demonstrating senior service design capability.
Professional experience: Significant experience in service design with time spent working on complex, multi-team services; expert understanding of service design methods, standards and principles.
Service design expertise: Extensive experience scoping and designing inclusive and accessible services based on user needs; highly able to create service blueprints, journey maps and prototypes at different fidelities.
Strategic thinking: Ability to zoom between big picture service strategy and detailed design execution; experience translating business strategy into service outcomes with clear success measures.
Evidence-based practice: Extensive experience using analytics, research, operational data and behavioural insights to understand needs, assess performance and make decisions.
Leadership & coaching: Proven ability to lead and coach junior designers, providing structured development plans and raising the feedback bar across teams.
Stakeholder management: Excellent communication skills with ability to make compelling cases to senior stakeholders; experience building trust and managing expectations across complex stakeholder landscapes.
Workshop & facilitation mastery: Extensive experience designing and facilitating complex workshops with challenging stakeholder groups, using participatory techniques effectively.
Agile leadership: Extensive experience leading service design work in Agile environments, dealing with complexity and ambiguity while ensuring attention to detail and continuous improvement.
Standards & patterns: Deep understanding of service standards (e.g. GOV.UK Service Standard), accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA) and pattern-led design approaches.
Commercial awareness: Understanding of service costing, cost-to-serve, investment cases and how to balance user needs with organizational constraints and capabilities.
Community contribution: Willingness to contribute to and potentially lead elements of the Service Design community of practice, sharing knowledge and building capability.
Why Join The Open University?
At The Open University, we're proud to lead the way in accessible education and digital transformation. As a Senior Service Designer, you'll have the opportunity to shape services that support millions of learners and staff, while helping to grow and influence a mature service design practice.
Our benefits include:
33 days annual leave, on top of bank holidays and a three-day Christmas closure period.
Access to a leading pension scheme for UK higher education with generous employer contributions.
Staff Fee Waivers for OU study, meaning you could earn a degree for free.
Hybrid working, with limited requirement to attend the office in-person, with agile working and family friendly policies.
Discounts, wellbeing support, and development opportunities.
Ready to make an impact?
Apply now and help us design inclusive, coherent services that truly work for everyone at one of the UK's most respected institutions.