Associate Director, Service Design & AI Transformation

Echo Talent; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Echo Talent is recruiting an Associate Director of Service Design to lead meaningful, complex transformation projects within a large, global professional services organisation. This role sits within a growing internal digital experience and design function, spanning business service transformation, digital culture and enablement, GenAI experimentation, and client facing service innovation.

The role is hands-on, combining service design, user research, insight generation, prototyping and

Qualifications

• Minimum extensive service design experience in professional services.
• Ability to unify strategy, design and technology in complex environments.
• Proven track record turning insights into actionable services.
• Experience leading cross-functional teams and workshops.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery, research and service design across major strategic initiatives spanning digital, data, technology, AI and business transformation.
• Design, implement and recommend technology enabled tools and services that solve genuine user and business problems.
• Review existing end to end services, identifying pain points, opportunities and areas for improvement.
• Translate complex business challenges into clear service concepts, recommendations and practical solutions.
• Bring the user perspective into strategy, roadmaps, investment decisions and technology choices.
• Build an insights engine that creates reusable findings and evidence that can inform a range of strategic and operational decisions.
• Develop evidence bases that help the organisation understand what to invest in, what to change and where emerging technologies can add value.
• Design and run workshops with key clients, users and senior stakeholders to uncover needs and create solutions.
• Use research and design evidence to challenge assumptions and influence strategic direction.
• Develop appropriate approaches to user testing and validation depending on the problem, audience and stage of development.
• Support AI roadmaps and GenAI initiatives across different services divisions.
• Explore emerging technologies and conduct market scanning to understand what is available and where it could provide genuine value.
• Assess whether new tools or technologies are worth bringing into the organisation, developing recommendations based on user needs, evidence and experimentation.
• Work with development and technology teams to experiment with GenAI and emerging digital capabilities.
• Support experimentation programmes designed to generate learning rather than simply deliver a predetermined solution.
• Help the organisation understand how technology can improve services while keeping user needs at the centre.
• Contribute to the development and adoption of a design system, helping standardise digital design across products and services.
• Help establish and manage a backlog of design work in partnership with product and development teams.
• Ensure design thinking continues through implementation rather than stopping at the strategy or discovery stage.
• Facilitate workshops, discovery sprints and co design sessions with senior stakeholders and clients.
• Present recommendations with clarity and gravitas, influencing strategy, investment and organisational direction.
• Work alongside change managers and product owners to bring new services and ways of working to life.
• Influence without relying on formal authority, bringing people together around evidence, user needs and a shared outcome.
• Champion service design as both a craft and a mindset across the organisation.
• Help build design maturity and embed user centred design into how the organisation thinks, plans and delivers.
• Support training, coaching and capability development across the wider organisation.
• Contribute to a community of user centred design, sharing approaches, standards, research and best practice.
• Depending on seniority, help lead a multidisciplinary design team of approximately 6-7 people, covering a range of design capabilities.
• Help shape the future structure, capability and ways of working of the design function.

Skills

Service design

Stakeholder management

Workshop facilitation

Prototyping

Strategic thinking

GenAI awareness

Job description

Echo Talent is recruiting an Associate Director of Service Design to lead meaningful, complex transformation projects within a large, global professional services organisation. This role sits within a growing internal digital experience and design function, spanning business service transformation, digital culture and enablement, GenAI experimentation, and client facing service innovation.

The role is hands-on, combining service design, user research, insight generation, prototyping and