Lead Service Designer

Job summary

HM Land Registry's services form part of the critical national infrastructure, safeguarding land and property ownership valued at £8 trillion. This enables over £1 trillion worth of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property across England and Wales.

It is an exciting time for HM Land Registry as we continue a major transformation programme. HMLR's ambition is to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.

We are looking for a Lead Service Designer who can help HMLR transform the way we serve our customers with Land Registration services that are customer focused, easy to use, accessible and work across multiple channels, devices, browsers and platforms.

As a Lead Service Designer, you will work on key strategic programmes and contribute across the full-service lifecycle of complex services. You will work as part of one or more agile, multidisciplinary teams designing new services or enhancing existing ones. You will be responsible for shaping seamless user experiences across both digital and offline channels, setting the direction for service design across a programme of work, ensuring joined up service thinking, consistency of experience and service design standards are met, and that our service design processes are being followed by all designers. You will lead and co-ordinate service design activity within your teams and strike a balance between hands-on service design practice and strategic decision making. You will move confidently between these roles and adapt your approach to meet the needs of different projects and stakeholders.

At practice level the work you will do with the Head of Design will inform and guide the practice strategy.

As a senior member of the design community, you will help drive design maturity across HM Land Registry by modelling best practice, communicating the value of user-centred design and championing the role of service design.

Check out the video below to find out what it is like working in our Transformation and Technology Directorate.

Job description

The role holder will have the below main duties:

• Lead and co-ordinate the service design activities in your multidisciplinary agile teams in your programme area to improve existing services and shape new ones that meet user needs and align with HM Land Registry’s policy objectives
• Partner with senior stakeholders and digital, data, and business leaders to identify opportunities across services and products, define complex problems through the lens of user needs and organisational priorities, and influence decision-making across your programme.
• Analyse and interpret user needs and business objectives across complex service areas to make expert decisions that balance the needs and outcomes of both parties
• Persuade senior stakeholders to implement design concepts and solutions that help re-imagine how services can be delivered end-to-end and from front to back
• Facilitate problem-framing, mapping, and service concept development workshops with multidisciplinary teams, senior project stakeholders, and users to ensure shared understanding and alignment on service improvements and build consensus around a design approach
• Lead and promote our design system and related Service design patterns; develop and maintain service design standards ensuring patterns and components are consistent, accessible, and easy to use across our digital products and services
• Work with your wider project team to ensure that services meet the digital service standard, establishing user-centred ways of working and coordinating and leading in service assessments as necessary to provide service design evidence to support the relevant points
• Present and deliver your/teams work, whether that is within your agile team, with the design community of practice that you will be part of, or outside of the organisation
• Mentor other service designers, contributing to their growth and development through providing feedback on their work, guidance, coaching and constructive challenge
• Collaborate with other service designers across government to identify and design scalable, cross-government design patterns and standards

Person specification

Essential technical criteria:

• Creating a strategy to deliver usable, consistent and accessible end to end services consistently across programmes of work
• Understanding senior stakeholder needs, and using design to inform and persuade these audiences
• Creation of service design artefacts, selecting the right tool and fidelity given the context of your work, for example, paper sketching, creating service prototypes, blueprints, experience and user journey maps and problem statements

Essential experience criteria:

• A strong grounding and experience in end-to-end service design, from discovery to final delivery
• Experience in a lead or strategic design role, leading other designers at organizational level, and making tactical, pragmatic decisions to influence strategic goals and develop service design maturity across multiple programmes of work
• Experience of managing senior stakeholder expectations, setting direction and navigating difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.
• Knowledge of what good end-to-end public services look like and how to direct designers to design in an inclusive, accessible way
• The ability to absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce simple designs, removing complexity from services and solving problems
• Experience of autonomously planning and managing backlogs of design work across an organisation, making key decisions that help the organisation meet planned objectives and strategy
• The ability to identify and understand high level organisational constraints and adjust how design work is approached across the programmes they lead service design in to work within those constraints
• Experience of collaborating and making strategic decisions at a project level with your lead counterparts in design adjacent practices such as user research, business analysis, software development, and product
• Experience of developing people within a design team, collaborating with team leads and head of practice to develop people, capabilities and skills to meet the practices strategic objectives

For more information about the role, please see the attached Job Description.

HMLR expect everyone to spend at least 60% of their working time in the office.

This role will require regular travel and overnight stays away from the home office.

You must ensure you have the appropriate right to work in the UK before applying.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving
• Leadership
• Making Effective Decisions

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• The Technical Criteria section (in no more than 250 words) should be used to demonstrate how you meet the following essential Technical Criteria.- Understanding senior stakeholder needs, and using design to inform and persuade these audiences

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,587, HM Land Registry contributes £16,393 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

#WeAreHMLR

At HM Land Registry our vision is a world leading property market as part of a thriving economy and a sustainable future. We are unique in terms of the economic and social impacts of our work, our ability to make a positive difference to the lives of our customers, our sense of mission, and our great people. They are the foundation of all we have achieved and all we aspire to in the future. We want our people to feel proud to work for HM Land Registry and able to fulfil their full potential.

We have a strong and positive culture, a commitment to inclusivity, an emphasis on continuous learning and development, and flexible ways of working. We offer competitive pay and annual leave, attractive pension options and a wide range of other benefits.

• We have integrity – we value honesty, trust and doing the right thing in the right way.
• We drive innovation – we are forward-thinking, embrace change and are continually improving our processes.
• We are professional – we value and grow our knowledge and professional expertise.
• We give assurance – we guarantee our services and provide confidence to the property market.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

To apply, you will need to complete the short application form and copy and paste your CV onto the online application form detailing your qualifications and work history.

Your CV will be assessed against the essential experience criteria detailed in the attached Job Description.

The Technical Criteria section (in no more than 250 words) should be used to demonstrate how you meet the following essential Technical Criteria.

• Understanding senior stakeholder needs, and using design to inform and persuade these audiences

The Personal Statement section (in no more than 500 words) should be used to outline your wider skills and experience for the role and detail how you meet the essential experience criteria listed below:

• A strong grounding and experience in end-to-end service design, from discovery to final delivery
• The ability to absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce simple designs, removing complexity from services and solving problems

In the event of a high volume of applications for this vacancy, an initial sift will be conducted on the CV and a full sift only carried out on those applications that pass the initial sift stage.

Please review your application form before clicking ‘submit’ – once you have submitted, you will not be able to amend your application. Ensure your application form is received by the closing date for receipt of applications – this is 23:55pm on the advertised date.

The sift will take place shortly after the closing date. If successful at shortlisting stage, you will be invited to attend an interview and deliver a pre-prepared presentation, from week commencing 6th October 2026. Further details will be provided on invitation to interview.

The blended interview will assess the essential technical criteria, experience and behaviours listed in the Job Description.

Please note that we will not be testing any of the desirable criteria throughout this process.

Candidates may refer to notes within their interview, but they should be used as a prompt only.

HMLR is accredited to the Disability Confident Scheme, which denotes organisations which have a positive attitude towards disabled people. Disabled applicants who meet the minimum essential criteria at the shortlisting stage may be invited to attend an interview. If you require the panel to consider a reasonable adjustment or there is anything else you would like the panel to take into consideration, you are asked to notify us of this at application stage where possible or during the process as soon as it becomes a requirement.

Candidates should be aware that any travel expenses incurred when attending interviews for this role will not be covered by HMLR.

Visa Sponsorship

Please note that we will only offer sponsorship for a skilled worker visa where a role is in a certain business critical category. This role does not meet that category, and we will not sponsor a skilled worker visa.

If you would like further information about the use of your personal data, please click on the link below:
Job Applicant Personal Information

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a basic (or equivalent) criminal record check.People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction. Read more about prison leaver recruitment (opens in new window).Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : Annmarie Kiddle
• Email : Annmarie.Kiddle@landregistry.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : hrresourcingteam2@landregistry.gov.uk

Further information

If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance to the Recruitment Principles and you wish to make a complaint, please email hrresourcingteam2@landregistry.gov.uk in the first instance. If you are not satisfied with the response you receive from HM Land Registry then you may take your complaint to the Civil Service Commission: http://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/making-complaint/

Attachments

Lead Service Designer Job Description Opens in new window (pdf, 161kB)