Lead User Researcher - Government Digital Service - G6 (IT)

As the Lead User Researcher for CustomerFirst, you?ll play a defining role in shaping the team to improve customer service at scale with a user-centred mindset. This is not about leading the research on a single project. This role will sit across multiple delivery squads setting the research strategy and practice, and conducting research yourself when needed. This role will be shaping how research is conducted across complex portfolios and helping government move from quick fixes to deep transformation based on what people fundamentally need from our services. CustomerFirst is still being built. Our operating model, culture and ways of working are evolving, and that?s deliberate. We?re looking for a Lead Researcher who is comfortable in ambiguity, and is motivated by the chance to build something new with real public impact. This is a hands-on leadership role, involving research tasks and also strategic direction and responsibility for a small team of researchers embedded in different projects. You?ll set direction and standards, and step in wherever needed to help teams deliver. What you will do As a Lead User Researcher, you will: develop and assure good user research practice across multiple teams, supporting researchers to adopt a range of techniques and to continuously improve oversee and lead the planning, design and delivery of user research to support the design and development of excellent public services establish and align user research activities and teams to meet organisational goals lead colleagues to analyse research data and synthesise clear and actionable findings ensure that teams take a user-centred, evidence-based approach to service design and delivery, and that our research includes all kinds of users contribute to the wider user research community ? taking on a leadership role in the community including sharing findings and insights across the organisation, mentoring other researchers, writing blog posts and leading on aspects of practice may be required to provide line management and leadership to a team of researchers This role will involve overseeing research across multiple different projects, each a partnership with a different organisation across government. This means you?ll be advising and coaching service teams on how to improve, as well as being part of a multidisciplinary team delivering a service. You?ll need skills building relationships quickly, identifying problems, and helping others to solve them. What this role offers a chance to fix real customer service problems that affect millions of people the opportunity to shape how government considers products and services, not just work within existing models exposure and opportunity to influence senior leadership across policy, operations, digital and delivery a start-up/ scale up environment with the mandate to challenge, experiment and build work with purpose, scale and visibility ? without losing pragmatism or pace Candidate profile: We?re interested in people who have experience: of a wide range of research methods, track record of deploying appropriate research methods for the product environment, and supporting others to adopt new approaches leading in ambiguity, providing others with support and direction to deliver results while external factors are uncertain. establishing and aligning user research activities to organisational goals. building stakeholder relationships quickly, and partnering with others to resolve issues and enable progress in user-centred practice and advocacy, including helping teams adopt user-centred practices in developing and assuring best practice in a wide range of user research methods