I recently made the formal switch in job roles from User Researcher to Service Designer, after a period spent acquiring the experiences and skills needed for the new role.
The process of moving into this role has led myself and the wider team to think about how we describe and implement service design practice within Lagom, and how we make the distinctions between different roles in the team.
The natural starting point for these discussions was the GDS Service Manual, which outlines the typical responsibilities of a service designer across public sector projects.
We spent some time in Miro mapping the knowledge and responsibilities described in the Service Manual against the typical activities of our public sector projects.
This helped us to articulate what a Lagom service designer should know about and be responsible for across our projects, and what activities are actually better owned by other roles in the team.
It was also a useful activity in helping me to identify what activities fall outside the scope of my role on Lagom projects. Notably, I won’t be producing coded prototypes any time soon. I will, however, be thinking about ways to solve the whole problems for our clients as they try to better understand and meet their user needs.
I’ve also been thinking about service design as part of our ongoing continuous improvement work at Lagom. Some thoughts and blogs about that work will follow soon.
