GDS Product Manager/User Researcher/Content Designer - Inside IR35 - Up to £600 per day
We're an independent digital transformation consultancy with clients across public and private sectors. We help our clients solve complex technical problems and provide human-centred solutions that lead to positive outcomes. We do this with multidisciplinary teams of strategists, architects, developers, designers and analysts working closely alongside client stakeholders and end users.
The role
We're looking for Product Managers, User Researchers and Content Designers with GDS experience to work in multidisciplinary teams designing and delivering innovative digital products and services for our Government clients.
You'll be a strong communicator, with experience of managing products and services in a Government environment. This includes engaging with stakeholders, ensuring the right structure is in place for effective agile delivery, leveraging the expertise of team members and facilitating alignment to the Government Service Standard.
Skills and experience required:
Product Management
You'll have a detailed understanding and experience of working to the Government Service Standard. (essential)
You'll have experience of digital and data products and services.
You'll take a clear approach to setting the product vision, product direction and can communicate this clearly at governance forums and in reports
You're able to create and maintain a product roadmap and agree this with stakeholders
You're confident when prioritising work, creating a product backlog and ensuring the agile team has the information and decisions required to move forward.
You're able to justify the reasons for moving work from the product backlog into delivery based on criteria and known constraints.
You're experienced in stakeholder management and engagement, able to create and work with a stakeholder engagement plan when needed
You'll monitor delivery using success metrics and assess the outcomes of change against expected benefits.
User Researcher
You'll have a detailed understanding and experience of working to the Government Service Standard, particularly the user-centred design principles. (essential)
You'll have experience planning and delivering user research across digital and data products and services, spanning Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and Live.
You'll be able to define clear research objectives aligned to service outcomes, policy intent, and delivery constraints, and communicate insights effectively to multidisciplinary teams and governance forums.
You're able to design, conduct, and analyse a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods, selecting appropriate approaches based on the problem being addressed and the maturity of the service.
You'll synthesise research findings into clear, actionable insights, using evidence to inform service design, product decisions, prioritisation, and trade-offs.
You're confident working collaboratively with product managers, designers, engineers, and policy colleagues, ensuring research is Embedded into delivery rather than treated as a standalone activity.
You'll manage research ethics and governance appropriately, including consent, accessibility, safeguarding, and data protection, in line with government standards.
You'll monitor the impact of research through measurable outcomes, assessing how insights have influenced decisions, reduced risk, and improved user and service outcomes.
Content Design
You'll have a detailed understanding and experience of working to the Government Service Standard, particularly the principles of designing clear, accessible, and user-centred content. (essential)
You'll have experience designing content for digital products and services, including transactional services, guidance, and data-driven services.
You'll be able to define and maintain a clear content strategy that supports service outcomes, policy intent, and user needs across Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and Live.
You're able to create, test, iterate, and publish content using evidence from user research, analytics, and service performance data.
You're confident designing content that meets accessibility and inclusion standards, including WCAG compliance, plain English principles, and readability requirements.
You'll work closely with user researchers, designers, product managers, and policy colleagues to ensure content is integrated into end-to-end service design rather than treated as an afterthought.
You're experienced in managing content governance, including content life cycles, ownership, approvals, and version control across complex services.
You'll monitor and evaluate content effectiveness using success metrics such as task completion, error rates, drop-off points, and user feedback, and use these insights to continuously improve content quality and service outcomes.
Lifecycle Management
You should be experienced at managing change through the development life cycle
You'll be adept at right-sizing work to take forward for development and can structure multiple change items to provide sets of valuable deliverables that realise benefits and result in overall improvements to service outcomes
Working closely with your team, you'll be able to take work through development and into testing and user acceptance, keeping capability and expectations aligned.
Ensuring a high level of quality, you'll be trusted to launch working deliverables, providing updates and communicating with stakeholders in a timely manner.
Agile Working
As an experienced product manager, you'll likely be a passionate agile advocate.
You'll be well versed at organising, facilitating and coaching the team. You'll encourage the team to take a collaborative approach to problem solving and guide your team to use appropriate agile methods and ceremonies
You'll have the drive to keep an agile team engaged and motivated. You'll be experienced at clearly articulating upcoming changes to the agile team and external stakeholders, working closely with a multidisciplinary team to leverage their capability
You'll be able to take the team with you on change initiatives throughout definition, design, development, user testing and into deployment. Experience working with augmented agile teams consisting of multi-disciplinary experts from multiple parties is a bonus.
Working Arrangements
Remote working, with potential for team and stakeholder meetings in London once a week. Arrangements may vary based on project and team needs.