Service Designer; FTC)

Job Title: Service Designer (12-Month FTC)

Location: Manchester

Salary: £59,850 - £66,500

Hours: Full Time

Duration: 12-Month Fixed-Term Contract

Working Pattern: Our work style is hybrid, spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, in the Manchester office.

Occasional travel: to other group locations (e.g. Leeds, London, Edinburgh) may be required.

The Service Designer shapes end-to-end services across people, process, technology, and data within a fast-moving innovation environment. Working from early discovery through MVP and scale, they help teams frame problems, design holistic service experiences, and make evidence-led decisions in ambiguous spaces.

• Design-Led Discovery & Insight Sense making – Leads discovery, synthesises insights across customer, market, and data signals, and frames opportunities in low-information environments.
• End-to-End Service Architecture & Systems Thinking – Designs service blueprints and maps dependencies across journeys, operations, platforms, and teams.
• Decision Leadership & Experimentation – Applies hypothesis-led thinking, JTBD, and lightweight experimentation to guide product and service direction.
• Technical & Operational Awareness – Designs within platform, API, and legacy constraints while using AI/LLM tools responsibly to accelerate service design workflows.
• Co-Creation & Stakeholder Facilitation – Brings together business, engineering, and customer perspectives to align desirability, feasibility, and viability.

Value proposition and business model design

Operating model and service scaling experience

Coaching and craft leadership within innovation teams

Outcome-focused mindset using metrics and analytics

The Group Innovation team sits within the GCOO organisation and focuses on turning bold ideas into real, scalable outcomes. Working in a fast-paced, startup-like environment, the team rapidly explores and validates new opportunities by testing customer desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility.

Through experimentation, design, and cross-functional collaboration, Group Innovation helps shape future propositions, unlock new growth areas, and bring cutting‑edge concepts from idea to delivery.

Our focus is to ensure we’re inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under‑represented groups.

We’re disability confident. So if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

• Generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• Annual performance‑related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top
• Range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow and thrive? Apply today and find out more!