Head of Product and Design

Salary: £68,525 per annum

Band: UKRI Band G

Contract Type: Open ended

Hours: Full-time/Part Time (minimum 0.8 FTE) (flexible working available)

Location: Polaris House, Swindon, Wiltshire - Hybrid working available

Closing Date: Sunday 9th November 2025

About the role

The Head of Product and Design is responsible for ensuring UKRI services are designed to effectively meet both user and organisational needs. In today's software as a service environment, UKRI no longer builds every service from scratch. The role holder plays a pivotal role in understanding business needs and ensuring that all platforms, whether off the shelf like UKRI's Oracle Fusion or in house developed services such as The UKRI Funding Service and Databank work together as an integrated digital ecosystem that serves our staff, stakeholders and wider external communities. Users are demanding. Services cannot just be set and forget. They must be configured to meet user needs and then iterated to meet changing needs. The role ensures that accessing all UKRI services becomes a seamless experience for users, reducing manual processing and improving outcomes. It ensures the technology we invest in is an enabler to success.

This includes the application of user-centred design techniques and processes throughout the full life cycle-from initial concept through to delivery. The role provides expert guidance on UK Government digital standards and ensuring services are secure, compliant and accessible, while mitigating technical risks and clarifying deliverables. The postholder leads a team comprising product managers and user-centred design professionals to realise value.

The role holder will prioritise team activities to deliver the best value for UKRI; pivoting existing UKRI services to automated processes where appropriate, and incorporating the use of artificial intelligence to meet user needs and drive efficiencies. They understand and encourage the cultural change required to embrace user led design and agile delivery methods in line with the Government Digital Service Standard and the Technology Code of Practice.

Your responsibilities:

• Product and User Centred Design leadership: Maintain an inclusive and high-performance culture. Promote a product and service mindset across the whole organisation, championing user centred approaches to addressing strategic questions and areas of unknowns to reduce risk.
• Advocate for UKRIs digital standards: accessibility, website standards and cookie policies; Ensuring they align with the Cabinet Office CDDO assurance standards and providing oversight of all UKRI spend approvals involving digital.
• Vision and roadmap development with a focus on outcomes: Working with the Head of Funding Platforms to ensure digital projects align to the strategic roadmap and are communicated effectively. All plans will incorporate service readiness and tracking progress to manage risks to delivery.
• Effectively manage complex interdependencies across projects, contributing to the planning and coordination of broader programmes and portfolios. Oversee and prioritise incoming digital service requests, collaborating with other Heads of Function to lead early-stage inception activities and ensure alignment with strategic objectives.
• Recruit and retain individuals within each multi-disciplinary area.
• Manage resource providers and suppliers as part of your team, responding effectively to changing priorities by balancing objectives and reassigning resources as required.
• Drive procurements of tools, services and resources needed to meet delivery goals.
• Managing the budget for digital services tools within tight guidelines and producing impactful business cases for any required additional spend.

Personal Specification

The below criteria will be scored during Shortlisting (S), Interview (I) or both (S&I).

Essential

• Proven experience of implementing digital services to UK Cabinet Office Digital Service standards (S&I)
• Deep technical or subject matter expertise in digital platforms, service design, or funding systems. (S&I)
• Demonstrable knowledge of generative AI tools and how they can automate manual business tasks. (S&I)
• Experience of creating and managing strong communities of practice (S&I)
• Proven experience of creating, implementing and managing digital services policies and standards (S&I)
• Experience of managing stakeholders and communicating to large groups of people both virtually and face to face. (S&I)
• Strategic thinker and problem solver. (S&I)
• Experience in managing multi-disciplinary teams (S&I)
• Proven substantial experience of user centred design (S&I)

Benefits

We recognise and value our employees as individuals and aim to provide a favourable pay and rewards package. We are committed to supporting employees' development and promote a culture of continuous learning!

A list of benefits below:

• An outstanding defined benefit pension scheme.
• 30 days' annual leave in addition to 10.5 public and privilege days (full time equivalent).
• Employee discounts and offers on retail and leisure activities.
• Employee assistance programme, providing confidential help and advice.
• Flexible working options.

Plus many more benefits and wellbeing initiatives that enable our employees to have a great work life balance!

For further information on our benefits please see:

Benefits of working at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)

UKRI is an Equal Opportunity & Disability Confident Employer.

Other important information

Please apply online, if you experience any issue applying, please contact (see below)

Please note, if you will require sponsorship to work in the UK, as part of your sponsorship application, you and any dependants travelling with you, will be required to pay costs directly to The Home Office for the application before you start your role with us. UKRI is normally able to reimburse some, or all of these fees after you have become an employee and this can be discussed with the Hiring Manager. For more information, please visit our website

Selection process

Please note that the recruitment process will involve two stages, an initial interview followed by a second-stage interview for shortlisted candidates.