Change your career, change lives
The Open University is the UK’s largest university, a world leader in flexible part-time education combining a mission to widen access to higher education with research excellence, transforming lives through education. Find out more about us and our mission by watching this short video (you will be taken to YouTube by clicking this link).
About the Role
As a Senior Service Designer, you will play a key role in maturing the OU's Design community and service-oriented approach. This role offers opportunities to lead service design work across complex service areas with a strategic and holistic mindset, working from discovery through to live operations and 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.
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
- Work at L3-L4 (Competent → Proficient) level across the Service Design Capability Framework, with measurable impact in your area and ability to shape how capabilities are applied.
- 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.
- You will work with the Service Design Capability Framework to guide your development toward Head of Service Design (G9) level, with clear progression pathways and regular development reviews.
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.
Support with your application
If you have any questions, or need support or adjustments relating to your application, the recruitment process, or the role, please contact us on 01908 541111 or email careers@open.ac.uk quoting the advert reference number.
What's in it for you?
At The Open University, we offer a range of benefits to recognise and reward great work, alongside policies and flexible working that contribute towards a great work life balance. Get all the details of what benefits we offer by visiting our Staff Benefits page (clicking this link will open a new window).
Flexible working
We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
It is anticipated that a hybrid working pattern can be adopted for this role, where the successful candidate can work from home and the office. However, as this role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office it is expected that some attendance in the office will be required when necessary and in response to business needs. We’d expect this to be on average 2 times per month.
Next steps in the Recruitment process
We anticipate that interviews for this role will be taking place online via Microsoft Teams during the week commencing 2 February 2026.
Early closing date notification
We may close this job advert earlier than the published closing date where a satisfactory number of applications are received. We would therefore encourage early applications.
How to apply
To apply for this role please submit the following documents:
- CV
- A personal statement of up to 1000 words. You should set out in your statement why you are interested in the role and provide examples of where your skills and experience meet the essential requirments for this role as detailed in the job description.
You can view your progress and application communications when you are logged into our recruitment system. Please check your spam/junk folders if you do not receive associated email updates.
