Deputy Director, Design Management (Product Development Office)

We are looking for a Design Leader to join our team and help drive the evolution of public services that matter. You'll bring strategic vision, design leadership, and organizational transformation skills to ensure we're solving the right problems and building high-performing design teams that deliver solutions with impact.

This role is ideal for someone who can drive impact through building new digital products and services, catalysing organizational change, and operating effectively at the intersection of technology, policy and operations.

What you'll do:

• Lead design strategy and execution across an agency portfolio, ensuring excellence and impact across multiple concurrent workstreams spanning service design, product design, and design research

• Drive discovery work to uncover root causes, user needs, and systemic barriers, bringing a rigorous approach to clearly frame problems before exploring possible solutions

• Guide teams to understand and reimagine end-to-end user experiences across systems, processes, touch-points, and stakeholders

• Partner with engineering leaders, product managers, policymakers and operations to bridge user needs with technical and business realities, ensuring solutions are both meaningful to users and implementable at scale

• Build and mentor design teams across disciplines, fostering a culture of craft, collaboration and continuous improvement

• Shape and evolve design-led frameworks for discovery, problem definition, solutioning and experimentation within your organization

• Build design capability within your agency and contribute to the wider public sector design practice, embedding design as a strategic strength

• Define and track measures of success to show the impact of design across product development and service delivery

You'll thrive here if you:

• Enjoy making sense of complex, ambiguous challenges across multiple domains simultaneously

• Relish expanding your impact from individual products to entire service ecosystems and organizational capability

• Can shift fluidly between strategic leadership, hands-on guidance, and organizational transformation

• Are energised by embedding with a team, understanding their domain deeply, and making things happen

• Focus on outcomes and long-term value, bringing rigorous thinking to government transformation

• Influence through building trust, clarity, and collaboration across all levels of organization

Who we are looking for:

• 10+ years designing and shipping digital solutions end-to-end — from insight, to product and service delivery, to GTM and impact

• 5+ years leading and growing design teams, with proven success building design culture and capability across disciplines

• Experience leading design across complex, multi-stakeholder environments (B2B, enterprise, or platform experience is particularly relevant)

• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and portfolios while maintaining quality and impact

• Mastery across design disciplines — problem framing, research, service design, product design, prototyping and storytelling — turning insight into action and inspiring others around it

• Comfort working at the edge of tech and design — fluent enough in APIs, system integrations, data-driven interfaces, and permissions models to co-create with engineers

• Commitment to accessibility and inclusive design (WCAG), ensuring services work for everyone

• Strong communicator and storyteller who builds trust quickly and brings people together at all organizational levels

• Entrepreneurial mindset with a drive to create impact for public good

What will make you stand out:

• Experience working in both start-up and enterprise environments, and in both in-house product teams and as an external consultant

• Proven success launching platform-scale or low-code/no-code products that empower non-technical users to create and adapt services

• Track record of hiring, developing and retaining design talent at scale

• Experience building design capabilities — from running training programmes to shaping communities of practice

• Work that shows real-world impact — whether in civic tech, public sector, or other mission-driven organizations

Why this role matters
Design at GovTech is about more than interfaces. It's about shaping services that people trust and rely on, and building the foundations of how the government works in an AI-enabled society. As Design Leader, you'll define what good looks like, build the teams and capabilities needed to deliver it, and help the government grow its capacity to deliver products and services that are not only functional — but clear, inclusive, and human.

GovTech is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives, as we believe it is key to innovation. 

Our employee benefits are based on a total rewards approach, offering a holistic and market-competitive suite of perks.

We champion flexible work arrangements (subject to your job role) and trust you to manage your time to deliver your best.

Learn more about life inside GovTech at go.gov.sg/GovTechCareers