Salary:National £72,000-£99,000, London: £80,000-£110,000
Location: Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Newcastle or Swansea
Hybrid working: Client-site/ Made Tech office 1-2 days per week
SFIA Level 6
If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email talent@madetech.com
Made Tech wants to positively impact the country's future by using technology to improve society. We believe being design-led can create positive outcomes in the public sector through critical services enabled by technology. We are building a community of designers and researchers to support the public sector's growing demand for a design-led approach to how services are delivered.
As a Discipline Head, User Research and reporting to the Head of User Centred Practice, you’ll enable public sector organisations to better research and design services that improve society. You will do this by building and managing strategic relationships with our clients and wider design community, leading a capability discipline within the overall user centred practice, overseeing client engagements and advising as a senior design leader.
Your role at Made Tech
- Work closely with our clients’ senior leadership to help inform strategy and ensure that we’re delivering high-quality work aligned to our customer’s technology vision
- Collaborate with Made Tech’s wider leadership team to ensure work aligns with our growth goals; you will play a pivotal role in identifying/ qualifying new opportunities, responding to client needs and winning work
- Develop and grow the discipline in line with business needs, hiring and line managing designers and researchers, developing our capabilities, propositions and playbooks to create a uniquely Made Tech way of embedding design-led thinking into all that we do
- Coach and support Designers and User Researchers to steer them and their teams towards successful delivery for our clients, enabling them and holding them accountable for producing high quality design deliverables
- Maintain a broad technical knowledge of user research and user-centred design practices, be able to shape design strategy, proposals, statements of work and roadmaps
- Maintain and grow your professional network as a leader within Made Tech. Contribute to thought leadership, content and events leveraging your track record as a design professional.
The following skills will be assessed during the application process
- Experience in growing and running user research or design teams
- Excellent understanding and passionate articulation of the value of user research and user-centred design
- Experience of developing communities of practice as a leader or member of a high-performing practice
- Ability to support others to grow their skills and user research capabilities and to take on more responsibility for client-facing projects
- Able to educate and mentor team members, colleagues and peers in the wider business on developing user research as part of user centred design, as a core discipline of agile delivery
- Experience in working directly with customers and users, and able to drive teams to deliver excellent outcomes for users
- Working within a design consultancy/ senior design leadership role in the public sector, health or allied areas
- Empathy and people skills
You might not have all of these skills but we can support you in developing them here
- Delivering/ managing disciplines within an account or programme leadership team
- Working with sales teams to build client relationships, develop opportunities and win new work
- Working with multidisciplinary digital and technology teams
- Working in the open - building the trust within teams to share little and often
- Experience in re-designing legacy services
- Maintaining a deep working knowledge of design and research techniques
Key measures for the role
- Growth and development of the User Research Discipline and User-Centred Practice at Made Tech in line with business needs
- Profitability of the User Research Disipline as part of the overall business profitability
- Successful relationships with our clients and colleagues across the Made Tech business
- Delivery of excellent public services for users with our clients
- Case studies, publications and speaking engagements on how to design and deliver excellent public services and outcomes (with appropriate client permissions)
Here at Made Tech, we’re committed to building a happy and diverse workforce. Throughout your interview process, you are welcome to speak to anyone from the following diverse groups: - antiracist-activists
- disability
- lgbtqiaplus-allies-and-activists
- neurodiversity
- parents-carers
- women-in-tech
This is completely optional but if you are interested in finding out more about life at Made Tech, please reach out to your respective agent or Talent Partner to set up a call.
Our Benefits
We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.
Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:
🕰️ Flexible Working Hours
👶 Flexible Parental Leave
👩💻 Remote Working
🤗 Paid counselling
More information can be found here
