Product Ops - Delivery Lead

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 of course, you’ll 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 for tomorrow. We invest the time  to best understand the needs of our customers, and 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 Delivery Lead to strengthen our rapidly growing team. We’re looking for someone with high data literacy, curiosity, and great communication skills. This is someone  who will identify great ways of working together, and empower our product teams to execute on their top priorities. 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 role.

The role

We’re looking for a super-powered Delivery Lead to join the team.

Product Operations is a new team at Pleo. By joining now, you will not only be able to 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. As we will staff the team even further throughout 2022, you'll quickly have more new 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. This role ensures that product teams have the best practices, tools, and resources available to execute in a manner that enables quality and speed, with a clear focus on how we run world class product delivery. You are responsible for ensuring we not only have the best possible delivery frameworks, processes and ways of measuring great delivery, you will also work very closely with different teams to coordinate their delivery efforts.

You’ll get to create our approach to next generation delivery and ways of working at Pleo, AND get to rapidly implement those same processes and ways of working. You’ll therefore be perfect for this role if you can easily switch between the very fine details and boots on the ground work, in parallel with  the zoomed out perspective evaluating the holistic delivery journey as it is today, and as the company grows.

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, build and deliver world class customer experiences.

As a Product Operations Delivery Lead, you'll support and coach our teams toward high feature execution and performance, empowering them via great methods to ship high quality and high speed delivery. You will optimise team productivity by removing impediments that may obstruct the pursuit of the team's goals, while still  preserving their autonomy and the ability to rapidly respond to changes.

General Responsibilities

• Ensure team(s) maintain focus on high quality and high speed continuous delivery
• Provide visibility into delivery targets, commitments and progress, and ensure frictionless collaboration and alignment across teams and competences
• Understand product team roadmaps and ensure dependencies are appropriately alleviated in a timely manner
• Be well managed – understand and coach our team on delivery controls/compliance to minimise operational risk
• Understand current organisational architecture and targets to identify upstream/downstream dependencies and to support our teams in roadmap, delivery and target dependencies
• Proactively identify impediments and appropriately resolve using network of peers and communications channels (including escalation if required)
• Ability to manage multiple stakeholders, and communicate updates in alignment and priorities clearly and effectively
• Support our team on backlog refinement and prioritisation when needed
• Utilize team feedback and metrics (quality, delivery rate, etc.) to identify areas of opportunity and works with our teams to continuously improve

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 delivering products in cross-functional teams from start to finish. SaaS experience is preferred
• Deep understanding of best practices in hyper growth company product delivery methods
• 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)