At minus 11 degrees, we went out into the snow. For 2 days, our grown leadership team kicked off the year outside of Brandenburg\u2019s state capital, Potsdam. Most of the time, we stayed inside the hotel, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2026 will bring further growth for the organisation. That means our structures, processes, and formats also need to evolve to allow scaling. That is why we, as the leadership team, decided to kick off the new year with focussed exchange, without the distractions of meetings and notifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting into the 2-day exchange, we discussed and synchronised our definition of \u2018alignment\u2019, as we use the term all too often but might mean different things. The alignment on \u2018alignment\u2019 was useful as we reviewed what is needed to prioritise and execute joint leadership activities over the next 6 months. One sensible hypothesis was: \u201cIf we spend more time talking about issues and ideas, we will have an easier time executing than if we jump into initiatives too quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A focus of our conversation was looking at how our now-established business unit leads and we, as heads of delivery, are working together. As the business units, which we called \u2018programmes\u2019 in UK departments, have been firmly established, we need to adapt roles and responsibilities within the leadership circle. In a useful exercise, we looked at things through 3 lenses: economic viability, subject expertise and discipline expertise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our project management office (PMO), in tandem with the business unit leads, deals with much of the economic viability. The business unit leads steer on their subject, e.g., \u2018digitalisation of law\u2019 or \u2018digital transformation instruments\u2018. The heads of delivery, including product, transformation, engineering, and user-centred design, lead their respective disciplines and related discipline expertise. While the latter is true, subject and discipline expertise are often hard to divide, and the heads of delivery have a stake in the subject, too. I know I have. That is why I am spending significant time with the Service Standard team<\/a> and the team working on the cross-government brand and design system<\/a>. So, while the lenses are useful for describing accountability, practical responsibilities may differ a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other topics we discussed include career paths and frameworks, onboarding for new senior colleagues, and overarching quality assurance. In the coming weeks, we will work on these strands, partially integrated into our day-to-day work and partially in parallel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After about 8 weeks, we closed our service design role at the end of the week. We received over 150 applications in that time. That is significantly less than for UX\/UI design and communication design roles before. It is still a terrific number, and we received various outstanding applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I interviewed 2 more candidates this week and will continue speaking to more people next week. As projects progress, we might end up hiring up to 4 or 5 service designers from that round, well above the previously anticipated number. The quality of this job campaign allows that, which is excellent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are quite a few applications from aspirational service designers. Many applicants are currently working as UX designers or have a similar label. Actual service design roles in Germany are rarer than in the UK or Finland, according to my observations. Given it\u2019s 2026, 15 years since I started Berlin\u2019s Service Design Drinks meetup<\/a>, I find that a bit puzzling. People expressed their excitement on LinkedIn, too, remarking that they thought service design no longer exists. In the public sector, it\u2019s more needed than ever, I\u2019d argue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Depending on the capacity of the talent acquisition team, we might open a content designer role by the end of January. We see significant demand in several areas, including Service Standard and the new Policy Excellence Centre. Both are content- and information-heavy offerings, where clear communication and content for public servants are essential. In the meantime, we will try to work with freelance content designers. I hope we\u2019ll find some good ones \u2013 but I learned that Germany is not the UK, and content designers are rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, various other organisations opened user-centred design roles. Again, they are sprinkled all across the country. So, I was able to update my little job board<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHiring some more user-centred designers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n