Strategic Design Lead - Innovation & Service Transformation

London Luton Airport Operations Limited

Luton

On-site

GBP 90,000 - 120,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

London Luton Airport Operations Ltd is seeking a Strategic Design Lead to shape how the airport evolves its products, services and operations. You will bridge innovation with the wider business, guiding teams through new ways of working and driving meaningful outcomes.

You’ll lead discovery-to-delivery initiatives, coach others, and collaborate with product designers, engineers, and stakeholders to fuse service design with real business value within an agile framework.

Qualifications

Demonstrable experience in service design for complex services.
Experience in product or service management, product design, or strategy consulting is a plus.
Strong prioritisation skills with ability to trade-offs and focus effort where it will have the greatest impact.
Ability to build credibility and trust quickly across senior stakeholders and frontline teams alike.
Strong research skills — comfortable recruiting, facilitating, and synthesising across qualitative methods.
An expert workshop designer and facilitator: hold a room, navigate tension and bring groups to clarity.
Fluency in core service design artefacts — journey maps, blueprints, personas, prototypes.
Ability to work at multiple altitudes: strategic framing one week, detailed interaction flows the next.
Strong communication and storytelling skills — rigorous yet accessible.
Experience working in agile delivery environments alongside product, engineering, and business teams.
A collaborative, curious and generous spirit.

Responsibilities

Define and drive product and service strategy across Now / Next / Later horizons, connecting immediate delivery to longer-term transformation.
Act as a translator between design, technology, data and business, making complex ideas accessible and actionable.
Apply service design, product thinking and systems thinking to real operational challenges, focusing on outcomes over artefacts.
Lead product, service or process initiatives from discovery through to delivery, working alongside your team, wider stakeholders, and third party service providers.
Facilitate prioritisation of the team’s workplan.
Plan and facilitate user research — interviews, contextual enquiry, workshops — synthesising findings into clear, actionable insight.
Map current and future-state customer journeys, service blueprints and ecosystem maps that build shared understanding across teams.
Facilitate co-design workshops, generating alignment and momentum around complex problems.
Define service principles, design criteria and success metrics that keep work grounded in real user and business needs.
Collaborate closely with product designers, tech leads and delivery leads to ensure service-level thinking flows into product decisions.
Partner with the Digital Lead and others in your team to navigate stakeholders and build strong relationships across the business.
Maintain pace and focus within agile sprint cycles, balancing rapid experimentation with meaningful delivery.
Build our service design practice sharing knowledge, developing frameworks and mentoring junior designers, and building a credible and effective innovation practice with the wider organisation.
Contribute to delivering a great guest experience by performing your role with accuracy and efficiency.