Manager/Senior Manager, Service Design and Strategy

About the role

The Customer Experience Division (CXD) at the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) is responsible for delivering a strong, consistent customer experience. The team leads customer experience initiatives, helps build a service-oriented culture, and works to ensure services across channels meet a high standard.

This position is suited to someone who brings both service design or user research capability and strategic thinking. It is a high-impact opportunity to shape a new service delivery channel for digitally challenged and vulnerable users by carrying out direct research with users and turning the findings into clear recommendations for senior leaders.

You will work across product, operations and policy to convert user needs and ecosystem gaps into actionable product directions, then help move those ideas into implementation by partnering closely with stakeholder teams. The role also contributes to ministry-wide service improvement work, including policy shaping and capability building to improve how MSF designs and delivers services.

This is a chance to work within a mission-driven, cross-functional CX environment and develop toward future roles in product, strategy or operations leadership.

Key responsibilities

• Plan and run end-to-end user research, such as interviews, surveys, observations and fieldwork, with a focus on understanding the experiences of vulnerable users navigating stressful service journeys.
• Choose and apply sound research methods that are appropriate for the problem being studied and produce reliable insights.
• Interpret research findings, identify recurring patterns and pain points, and convert them into practical, actionable recommendations.
• Own initiatives from the stage of framing the problem and setting scope through to execution, while keeping the work anchored in a user-centred approach.
• Collaborate across business, technology and operations teams to turn insights into workable solutions and support the path to implementation.
• Work effectively in uncertain and evolving problem areas, build trust with stakeholders, keep them aligned, and sustain momentum on delivery.
• Support ministry-wide service improvement initiatives, which may involve policy development, capability-building efforts or reviews of service journeys.
• Help strengthen MSF’s overall approach to service design, user research and customer experience strategy across the organisation.

Requirements

• 3 to 6 years of experience in product, UX design, or user research.
• Strong ability to design and execute user research, including interviews, surveys and fieldwork, and to turn insights into clear recommendations.
• Comfort working at both the service and systems level, including flows, access, edge cases and cross-channel experiences.
• Good critical thinking and curiosity about user and business problems, with the ability to balance customer needs against operational and policy realities.
• Experience working with product and service teams to use qualitative and quantitative inputs for decisions, design validation and continuous improvement.
• Self-driven and adaptable, with the ability to define problems, create clarity and keep work moving in ambiguous, changing environments.
• Capable of managing competing priorities while maintaining alignment with stakeholders.

Additional information

The role involves operating at the intersection of product, operations and policy, with a strong emphasis on translating user insight into implementation. It also offers exposure to ministry-level service strategy and capability development work.