Lead Content Designer

**Who we are**

**Open Government Products** is an experimental tech start-up team within the government that consists mainly of engineers, designers, and product managers who build technology for public good. We proactively identify areas where technology can help, test our prototypes with actual users, and bring our best ones to launch. As an experimental team, we have redesigned our organisation to move quickly, fail fast, and scale what works to deliver the maximum public good within a larger bureaucracy. We think about how we run the organisation from first principles, keep a flat hierarchy to maximise ownership, and bypass bureaucracy to focus on delivery of good products through a good organisation. We work on real problems, build for the user, and push for change.

**Summary**:
As a Lead Content Designer at OGP, you are a fully proficient individual contributor who is also able to provide guidance to the content design team. You will play a key role in shaping how members of the public interact with government products and services. This role goes beyond crafting content; it involves advocating for a user-centred approach to content design, shaping how information is structured and understood, and enabling government officers to communicate clearly and effectively. You will lead a small but growing team, driving both operational excellence, and strategic content initiatives across the organisation, and the rest of the government.

**This is a hybrid IC/management role - you will have some IC responsibilities, and will also manage two direct reports.
This is **not** a creative/graphic design role.

**Responsibilities**:

- ** Lead the team**: Lead and grow the content design team, ensuring workloads are balanced, and the team delivers high-quality content across multiple projects. Identify skill gaps, performance issues, and opportunities for improvement within the content design sphere.
- ** Define processes**: Establish scalable content design processes and operational models to maximise the team’s impact.
- ** Advocate for content design**: Champion content design not just as wordsmithing, but as an essential part of product design, including aspects like writing in plain language, information architecture, card sorting, and labelling.
- ** Enable and train**: Build capability across OGP and partner agencies by training and enabling public officers to adopt content design principles, with a focus on simplicity and clarity in communication.
- ** Manage resources**: Collaborate with design leadership to propose and implement a resource management model that ensures the team’s capacity meets growing demands, and maintains high-quality output. Proactively scope new work opportunities that elevate the quality of OGP products.
- ** Collaborate and co-create**:Build working relationships across functions, government agencies, and external stakeholders to co-create solutions.

**Lead design initiatives**: Lead end-to-end content design for large initiatives, balancing user needs, public policy goals, and technical constraints.

**You’ll need**:

- A passion for making government services more accessible and user-friendly through effective content design.
- A strong portfolio showcasing your content design work, and demonstrating your ability to create user-centred content.
- Experience building and managing a team of content designers, and growing careers.
- Hands-on experience designing and building high-quality products and experiences.
- A strong understanding of accessibility principles and guidelines.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in cross-functional (and sometimes ambiguous) teams.
- Experience working in agile or iterative development environments.
- Proficiency with tools such as Figma, Slack, and Notion. Experience with web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a valuable plus.
- To be willing to use Oxford commas; this is a non-negotiable.

Digital services are about improving the way people interact with their government. Getting the subtle details right is the difference between an intuitive experience and a frustrating one. As we launch new products and grow our design practice, your role will be to set standards and guide the OGP design team, so we can build tech for public good that isn’t just functional, but delightful to use.