Product Operations Manager

We’re looking for our next colleague, someone who can own, nurture and perfect how we work at Pleo. 

Product Operations is the latest best-practice in the world’s leading tech companies, providing the right data, tools, and streamlined processes for our Product teams so they can focus on what matters most - building world-class products and awesome customer experiences. You will be identifying opportunities to drive operational excellence, building the processes, frameworks and ways of working for the world's greatest product teams, and you’ll of course also take part in implementing the solutions from A to Z. Since Product Operations is a new team at Pleo, there will be plenty of opportunities to take on varied projects, working across multiple teams and departments, not to mention having a direct influence on the future of the team.

Product Operations is a specialised unit that is cross functional in nature. To truly empower our product teams, we need to understand the needs of the different parts of the organisation, not to mention how our product teams work today and how we can improve on that. We need to understand how to best understand the needs of our customers and we need to understand how to best empower our teams so they can produce the greatest possible outcomes. You should therefore be a bit of a super-powered sponge, who absorbs all kinds of different inputs, and in turn, synthesise and analyse your way to scalable solutions.

We are hiring a Product Operations Manager to strengthen our rapidly growing team. We’re looking for someone with high data literacy, curiosity, and great communication skills to help us identify and create great ways of working to empower our product teams. The right candidate will bring experience from other SaaS B2B companies, where you’ve been exposed to product development processes. If you are a positive, curious and motivated person who likes a fast-paced environment, enjoys problem-solving, and has the urge to improve processes on an ongoing basis, you will enjoy this Product Operations role.

The role

We’re looking for a Product Operations Manager to join the team.

Product Operations at Pleo is new and by joining now, you will be able to not only help shape your own role as the team grows, you'll also have a direct impact on the growth and scope of the entire team. You will be working closely with and reporting to our Head of Product Operations and we will grow the team even further throughout 2022, so you'll quickly have more team members to collaborate with.

You will treat the product development lifecycle at Pleo as a product, and help it evolve into an even greater system than it is today. You will treat our product teams as your customer and you will need to champion best practices in ways of working on product teams. This role ensures that product teams have the practices, tools, and resources to execute in a manner that enables quality and speed as we scale.

This is not a project management job. The Product Development Lifecycle and the empowering of our product teams is your “product” to manage. We are looking for someone to drive adoption of easy but effective self-service tools, workflows and systems. We’re all about enabling autonomous teams.

In this role, you will span across a wide range of projects that all aim to set our product teams up for success, so they can thrive and build world class customer experiences.

Among other things, you will be: 

• Building and continually fine-tuning our ways of working with insights in our Product teams, including how to best go about collecting and surfacing relevant insights to the right people at the right time 
• Continually optimising our ways of working with roadmaps and internal communication as a way of ensuring organisational transparency and alignment - balancing steering mechanisms and autonomy
• Developing and maintaining the next wave of recurring alignment mechanisms and ceremonies
• Supporting your team as they collect, organise and analyse quantitative and qualitative product team data, and deliver key insights that inform product decisions across the organisation
• Building best practices and workflows to enable great discovery and delivery on our product teams
• Driving initiatives that improve the effectiveness and efficiency of internal processes, allowing our Product teams to deliver high quality outcomes at great speed.
• Articulating and championing our Product Development Lifecycle from A to Z
• Facilitating and creating alignment on ways of working with internal communication by
• Supporting regular communications on product vision and progress
• Serving as an internal subject matter expert to help drive cross-functional initiatives
• Documenting product areas and capabilities for internal and external stakeholders
  
  

About you

You must be detail-oriented with strong written and verbal communication skills. You are excited about empowering and enabling a growing organisation in ways that will vastly improve Pleo's efficiency and growth. You are able to craft a plan and build projects while focusing on day-to-day tactical goals and operate with a flexible mindset.

• You have 3-5 years of hands-on experience in process management and delivering products in cross-functional teams from start to finish. SaaS experience is preferred
• You love learning new things and enjoy working with problem areas you aren't necessarily an expert in
• You are curious, technologically savvy and not afraid of getting hands-on in the details. You probably dismantled things as a child, to see how they worked. You want to know how things work!
• You have experience with working on larger cross functional projects
• You may have some consulting experience or worked within a fast growing start-up
• You have a good understanding of how data and insights tie into decision making
• Knowledge of agile methodology and processes
• Extensive experience with project management and stakeholder management
• Ability to facilitate meetings and workshops without needing to dominate conversations is required
  
  

Here are some of the key values we look for for the Product Operations team

We are looking for: excellent communication and facilitation skills, being an enabler in workshops and meetings, and a strong focus on proactive and cross-functional collaboration. You should have an analytical mindset, with a strong ability to analyse what the problem truly is, while staying highly organised. Our team members need to quickly gain an end-to-end view of the business (understanding how information, tasks, and products move through the org), so the ability to create clean structures, workflows and processes is a must.  

A lot of organisations (especially ones that focus on speed or velocity, or are more output driven) have an allergy to Processes so there’s a certain amount of ‘letting go’ of your own bad experiences in dealing with inefficient or ill-fitting processes that’s required, and there’s a lot of behaviour change required to create and roll out new organisation wide processes - if you’re not someone with a strong focus on, and reputation for building culture, you’ll have an uphill battle.

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending)
• Flexible working remote options for those onsite (just speak to your team)
• Quarterly trips to somewhere for team camps (both company-wide ones and team-specific ones).
• Investment in learning & developing (just check with your team for what's reasonable, we don't have set budgets)
  

And here are some other nice gestures that we do

• Catered lunch in our HQ and London offices when you're here
• 25 days holidays (annual)
• Ability to work remotely (anywhere between East Coast of the Americas to European timezones)
• Loads of weird and wonderful niche communities to join in the company (we're talking guerrilla gardening, liquids tasting, the Pleo band, learning to code initiatives, beer brewing, skiing, Pleo dinners, that type of thing)
• Wild enthusiasm and encouragement from us if you want to host MeetUps, events, etc - we'll help (venue, food etc)