Federal Service Designer: Discovery to Roadmaps

steampunk; Illinois; On-site; USD 85,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Steampunk is seeking a Service Designer to guide clients through Design Intelligence framework, providing research and design foundations for portfolio optimization and data governance within a large federal advisory program.

You’ll lead discovery, uncover pain points, and voice user needs to influence recommendations; build blueprints and roadmaps, and run prototyping and usability studies across governance artifacts and workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree preferred in Human-Centered Design, Service Design, or related field.
• 5+ years of service design or UX research experience, including service blueprinting and journey mapping.
• Portfolio showing design process, methods, and craft across service design/UX research engagements.
• Experience with affinity diagramming, card sorting, and persona development.
• Experience running usability testing and prototyping cycles with real end users.
• Experience in an Agile delivery framework.
• Excellent written communication and presentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Conduct process, technology, and organizational research to build evidence for portfolio optimization recommendations.
• Facilitate discovery workshops and interviews to frame pain points and opportunities and validate hypotheses with real users and stakeholders.
• Build frontstage/backstage service blueprints and vision roadmaps aligning user outcomes to systems and investments.
• Conduct empathy interviews and shadowing to map end-to-end data journeys.
• Apply card sorting and persona development to shape catalog and metadata design.
• Synthesize research into insights and recommendations shaping program strategy and future-state experience vision.
• Run lo-fi/hi-fi prototyping and usability testing on governance artifacts before enterprise rollout.
• Build service blueprints spanning Policy, People, Process, Technology.
• Collaborate with a cross-functional Agile team to communicate user needs.
• Ensure deliverables are high quality across assigned workstreams.

Skills

User research

Service design

Facilitation

Agile collaboration

Research synthesis

Presentation skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in Human-Centered Design or related field

Tools

Adobe Creative Suite

Mural

Lucidchart

Job description

Steampunk is seeking a Service Designer to guide clients through Design Intelligence framework, providing research and design foundations for portfolio optimization and data governance within a large federal advisory program.

You’ll lead discovery, uncover pain points, and voice user needs to influence recommendations; build blueprints and roadmaps, and run prototyping and usability studies across governance artifacts and workflows.