Service Design Associate Manager

About Accenture Song

Accenture Song accelerates growth and value for our clients through sustained customer relevance. Our capabilities span ideation to execution: growth, product and experience design; technology and experience platforms; creative, media and marketing strategy; and campaign, content and channel orchestration. With strong client relationships and deep industry expertise, we help our clients operate at the speed of life through the unlimited potential of imagination, technology and intelligence. Visit us at: www.accenture.com/song

Job Description

Role summary

As a Service Design Associate Manager, you will lead the design and improvement of complex end-to-end digital products and services. You will bring deep service design craft expertise, human-centred design, and systems thinking to make sense of complexity, shape service strategy and turn insight into meaningful outcomes for users and organisations.

You will see service design as more than a method for improving existing experiences. You will use it as a reinvention tool to rethink service models, shape product and service vision, and explore new ways for organisations and customers to interact.

You will take ownership of service design quality and delivery, working across multidisciplinary teams and influencing stakeholders to make confident, evidence-based decisions. You will also support the development of other designers and be open to using AI-enabled tools to enhance the design workflow and produce high-quality outputs.

What you’ll be working on

You will lead service design across complex digital products, services and programmes within the Accenture Song Design Digital Products Creative team, from research and discovery through to design and delivery.

Your work may span a range of industries, including Health & Public Services, financial services, telecommunications, retail, utilities and resources, automotive and life sciences. You will work across end-to-end services, connecting user experience with organisational, operational and business needs.

You willbe improving an existing service, shaping a new service proposition or helping clients imagine entirely new service models and customer experiences.

Whatyou’ll do

Understand and shape complex services

• Apply deep service design, human-centred design and systems thinking expertise to understand users, organisations and complex service ecosystems.

• Translate research, data and other evidence into clear insights, strategic opportunities and service direction.

• Navigate ambiguity and complexity, creating clarity and helping teams make confident design decisions.

• Connect user needs, organisational context and business objectives to shape coherent end-to-end services.

• Challenge existing assumptions and use service design to explore new propositions, service models and future experiences.

• Help shape the why of a product or service by contributing to its vision, strategy and value proposition, as well as defining how it should work.

Lead service design craft and quality

• Lead the creation of high-quality service design artefacts, including journey maps, service blueprints, systems maps, personas and opportunity frameworks.

• Evolve and apply service design methods, prototyping approaches and frameworks to meet complex project needs and ambitious business questions.

• Lead the development and testing of service concepts and prototypes to build alignment, reduce risk and inform decision making.

• Translate service design work into actionable recommendations, service strategy and measurable outcomes.

• Use service design outputs not simply to document services, but to provoke thinking, shape vision and influence strategic decisions.

• Take ownership of service design quality, providing design critique and quality assurance across workstreams and teams.

• Explore and use AI-enabled tools, where appropriate, to enhance synthesis, ideation, prototyping and design outputs while maintainingstrong design governance, design judgement and quality assurance.

Facilitate, influence and collaborate

• Plan and lead co-design, ideation and strategic service design workshops with users, senior stakeholders and multidisciplinary teams.

• Influence stakeholders and build buy-in for service design recommendations within complex programmes.

• Be a compelling storyteller, bringing together evidence, emotion, empathy and clarity to make complex service ideas meaningful and memorable.

• Communicate complex service design thinking clearly, both verbally and visually, to senior client and internal stakeholders.

• Build narratives that connect user needs, business opportunities and service vision, helping stakeholders understand both why change is needed and what the future could look like.

• Collaborate across user research, product, content, strategy, business design, data, engineering and other design disciplines.

• Build alignment across teams and help resolve competing user, business and delivery priorities.

Lead delivery

• Connect strategic service intent with practical delivery, ensuring the vision remains coherent as products and services evolve.

• Own and lead service design workstreams or design projects from planning through to delivery.

• Plan design activities, resources and priorities to deliver high-quality outcomes within project timelines.

• Coordinate service design across multiple teams or areas of a complex end-to-end service.

• Identify design risks, dependencies and opportunities and work with delivery teams to address them.

• Maintain a clear view of service outcomes while balancing user needs, business objectives and delivery constraints.

How you’ll contribute

• Advocate confidently for service design as both a user-centred practice and a tool for business and service reinvention.

• Provide craft leadership, mentoring and constructive critique to designers.

• Line manage and support designers in their performance, development and career growth where required.

• Help shape and improve service design capability, methods and standards across the wider design community.

• Encourage teams to challenge assumptions, explore possibilities and think beyond incremental service improvement.

• Share emerging approaches and tools, including AI, to improve the quality and efficiency of design practice.

• Contribute to a strong, collaborative design culture and support designers to develop their craft.

• Contribute to business development, bringing service design thinking, storytelling and future-focused ideas into client conversations, pitches and proposals.