In these unprecedented times, Citizens Advice is at the frontline of helping people face the challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic. Between 9 March and 9 April, we helped 220,000 people with one-to-one advice over the phone, by email and webchat and our website saw 9 million views.

Our teams are working hard to provide the best advice for people in difficult situations. We’re responding rapidly to people’s changing needs, and helping those who need us most.

The Lab is a small multidisciplinary team, within the Customer Journey team. We do rapid experimentation in areas we know less about to find new ways to meet the needs of our users.  

We do this in the leanest possible way. For example, in our Speech to Text experiment we tested a prototype without using the technology at all. 

We’re here to help Citizens Advice transform its processes, ways of working, and technology to better meet our users’ needs. This means our experiments are as often behavioural as they are technological. The Lab takes an inventive, responsible and generous approach to its work, building on the expertise and ideas of colleagues across the network. It works openly, with a core team of innovation experts and in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines. 

As one of two product owners in the Lab your role will be to ensure the effective development and delivery of ideation, experimentation and prototyping of ideas for the Citizens Advice of the future. The role is responsible for leading the incubation phase of these propositions, as well as building engagement and ownership across the organisation for successful scaling. 

You will be doing this through co-designing an Incubator Network – a group of local Citizens Advice offices who we work with to test and pilot ideas – and by working with a diverse group of collaborators. Systemic change is an important part of what we do, and collaboration skills are key.

Candidates will have:

• Experience of delivering user-centered digital products and services, working with multidisciplinary product teams.
• Ability to plan and facilitate workshops with senior stakeholders to prioritise user needs and product plans, working within resource constraints. 
• Excellent ability to form product backlogs, responding to stakeholder influence while prioritising user-centred features.
• The skills to develop and communicate a product vision and strategy.

Here is a bit more background on the lab and how we’re exploring the future of Citizens Advice.

Come and join us!

We’re an equal opportunity employer and prize diversity as a strength. Everyone is welcome at Citizens Advice. We offer flexible working, and are open to part-time and job sharing too. In fact, several of our leadership team members work four days a week.

We particularly welcome applications from disabled and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates as BAME and disabled people are currently under-represented throughout Citizens Advice. We are a member of the race equality campaign at Business in the Community, the Prince’s responsible business network and are committed to improving employment opportunities for ethnic minorities across the UK. We also welcome applications from, LGB and Trans and non binary candidates.
We have made a positive commitment to employing disabled people and guarantee to interview all disabled candidates who meet the minimum essential criteria for the role as set out in role profiles.