Introducing the Team: Jodie Stanley

In March this year I got a call from a recruitment consultant; he wanted to know if I was interested in a service design role at small consultancy, who worked with charities to help them strengthen their grant making and other services. I was ready for a new challenge. Fortunately for me, I was interviewed by four (clearly very intelligent) and welcoming staff members at Hyphen8 and offered the role!

Fast forward a couple of months and it’s now week 3 of working at Hyphen8, so I wanted to share my experience so far. I joined Hyphen8 as a Service Designer from Citizens Advice – and anyone who’s moved from a pretty large organisation to a much smaller one, or vice versa will know the mental and cultural shock that you may go through.

I’ll be honest, for the first few days, I felt a bit like a rabbit caught in headlights! There’s a lot to get your head around – and for someone who’s not particularly technically minded – it can be quite mind-blowing listening in on calls with the amazing tech team here at H8.

But it’s week three now – and the transition from working at a large charity to a small consultancy has been made much smoother by the great people employed at Hyphen8. Even working remotely, the team here have managed to make me feel like I am a part of something exciting. And I’ve reminded myself that everyone brings their own special area of expertise to this great company. I’m excited to get cracking with helping charities to shape their funding services and other services around their users- because I might not be able to code a salesforce platform – but I do know how to listen to people and bring their experiences and views to light when designing services. It’s early days but I’m already itching to work with some amazing charities and help them to make the most impact that they can through service design and user research.

Working in service design and research has opened my eyes to the common problems that users can experience whilst navigating through, often complex, services. I’m keen to use this experience to help our clients design services that really work, not just for them, but most importantly for those on the other side, who can benefit greatly from the services our clients provide.

This job has already reminded me the importance of knowing that you never know enough, so I will keep learning and growing and working alongside charities to shape their services with their users at the centre of what they do. Because life’s too short to be the person that you were yesterday.