Come lead design at the Red Cross
We are looking for two people to lead our design community of practice:
In summary about both roles:
- £50,000 per year
- Permanent
- Flexible working, office work in London — when we go back to offices
- A mix of hands-on design work and management
Informal chats
We want to give prospective candidates the opportunity to meet the wider team, ask questions and learn if they’d want to apply.
These will be 30 minutes slots over video or phone. These conversations will be informal and based around what you want to learn about the team, the work it does and how it does it.
In these time slots some designers and other leads you’d be potentially working with:
- Shafqat, interaction designer
- Vicky, service designer
- Charlotte, service designer
- Beatriz, Digital Delivery
- Jo, Digital Transformation Lead
- Olie, Digital Product Lead
- Jess, Head of Innovation
- Adam, Director of Digital and Innovation
- Harry (me), Lead Designer
If you’re interested in meeting some of the team, contact me by:
- Email — HarryTrimble@redcross.org.uk
- Message on Twitter. My DMs are open.
(Please, no recruiters)
What the job is like
It doesn’t always come across from every job description of what the job is actually gonna be like. I’ve written a personal blog post about what it is like being a lead designer at the Red Cross:
Leading design at the Red Cross: lessons I’ve learned.
Why join the Red Cross now?
I’m genuinely excited about how the Red Cross movement will change in the next year or two– adopting further user-centred design, multidisciplinary teams and Internet ways of working to deliver good services. The reason I’m hopeful is in my two years at the Red Cross, the conversations have fundamentally changed.
Two years ago
When I first joined in spring 2019, the Digital and Innovation teams was seen as an internal agency. A capability to build ideas from other parts of the organisation. For example, we’d be asked to build a complicated website without clear user needs. We were expected to just make the thing, no questions asked.
Now — fewer silos, more collaboration
Today the conversations are different:
- Working with the operations department to set up proper multidisciplinary teams, who work full-time on our three causes; disasters and emergencies, migration and displacement, health inequalities.
- We are collaborating with the finance department to see how money saved by moving to modern technologies and ways-of-working can be re-invested to bring more digital skills in-house, such as software engineers and content designers.
- Norman, Executive Director of UK Operations, is having one of our teams design a core part of the new 2030 Strategy; how we approach working with communities at higher risk of crisis.
Delivering more by working differently
This winning of hearts and mind is because of delivering more for users. Helping more people finding missing family; scaling volunteering in an emergency; simplifying processes for hospital workers; beginning a design system that makes our services clearer and more accessible.
Delivering more comes from working differently. More teams are taking a design approach. More teams are learning from user research. More teams have and are asking for digital skills. More teams are working in the open.
None of this is perfect, but we are getting more done than before, which creates space to do more. I hope it makes you excited too and you’ll consider leading design at the Red Cross. It’s worth the challenge.
You may have guessed from this post I’m leaving the Red Cross. I’m starting a new job in Bristol, where my partner and I relocated to last year. Before I go I’m excited for the team and myself meeting people interested in the two lead design roles.
