Job Introduction

Product Group is responsible for the design, development, and delivery of the BBC’s portfolio of digital products. Our mission comes straight from the BBC’s four priorities: to deliver content that is loved by all audiences; and to extract more from online by joining up the whole of the BBC to connect more deeply with our audiences.

Our portfolio is diverse and contains some of the largest and highest profile properties on the UK internet. We’re a huge streaming media destination, a news source trusted across the world, a provider of educational and entertaining content to children of all ages, and a sports results, analysis, and commentary service, and much more besides. It's an unparalleled portfolio of products, and our strength is our range and breadth. Working with the BBC’s content divisions, our focus now is on increasing engagement across our portfolio so that the BBC online becomes a valued daily habit for all audiences just as television and radio have been over the last century.

Role Responsibility

Being a Head of Product means you’ll be the driving force in shaping and delivering the strategy for your product area, ensuring it is world-class and contributes to the overall goals for the portfolio. You’ll have the skills and ability to work across our portfolio, which could mean leading different product areas if needed, so working collaboratively to ensure breadth as well as depth of knowledge is essential. You’ll build excellent relationships with the service leads in our content business to make sure that product and content are fully aligned. You’ll line manage a team of product managers and business analysts and lead the multifunctional teams which work on the product. And you’ll work closely with our engineering, UX, editorial, marketing, and distribution teams to make sure that your product is robust, resilient, engaging, and available everywhere.

We’re recruiting for a Head of Product to lead our new Content discovery product area. This new area will bring together our content discovery product capabilities (search, recommendations etc.) and which enable us to delight users with content that is relevant to them. You’ll lead the teams which are working on our pan-portfolio experiences, such as the homepage and those functions which allow users to follow topics across the BBC and which present curations from all areas of our content. You’ll lead on the development of rules-based and AI / ML-enabled recommendations engines, and our cross-site search and personalisation activities. And you’ll help us grow the off-product activities which bring audiences to us: driving forwards activities in search engine optimisation and notifications.

The Ideal Candidate

• A seasoned product leader : You have extensive experience executing on the strategy, and building and delivering an ambitious, outcome-focused roadmap. You create a compelling vision and translate it into a strategy and roadmap that stakeholders at all levels of the organisation support. You motivate your team and the company by elucidating the 'why,' providing context to help them succeed.
• Data-driven : You own your metrics, care deeply about the numbers, and inspire the same in your team's PMs, establishing the necessary frameworks and processes to make data a core component of our product practises.
• Growth mindset : You assist teams in developing impactful, well-structured experiments to optimise product growth and retention at a rapid pace, laying the groundwork and processes for running concurrent experiments, reporting results and next-best-action on a regular basis.
• Clarity of vision to execute : You create quantifiable, ambitious OKRs and work with teams to help them achieve more than they ever imagined. You understand what a high-performing team looks like, and you work hard to ensure that your team is recognised as one of the best.
• Technically-minded : You like delving to understand the nitty gritty of a complex system in order to tackle the solve difficult user problems, and you can communicate technical nuances to less technically savvy stakeholders.
• An accomplished coach and a mentor: You have substantial product management expertise and take delight in coaching and mentoring your PMs to help them develop and accomplish their career objectives.
• Have an inquisitive mind: You want to improve BBC Product and all elements of the business, and you're always looking for new methods to do it, quickly becoming a domain expert.

And of course, you’ll be passionate about our content and purpose and be able to liaise with senior stakeholders in our content divisions fluently and confidently.

Product Group is more than a 1,000 people, located across the UK, with significant bases in London, Salford, and Glasgow, and ambitions to grow our presence in Cardiff and Newcastle. 

This role may be based in any of our bases, with an expectation that frequent travel will be required in order to meet with stakeholders and teams.

Package Description

Band: F
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Cardiff OR Glasgow OR London OR Salford OR Newcastle

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression â€“ the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities â€“ our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits- We offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.

The situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak is developing quickly and the BBC is keen to continue to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people across the BBC, while continuing to protect our services. To reduce the risk access to BBC buildings is limited to those essential to our broadcast output. From Wednesday 18th March until further notice all assessments and interviews will be conducted remotely. For more information go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/careers/

Mae’r sefyllfa gyda’r coronafeirws yn datblygu’n gyflym, ac mae’r BBC yn awyddus i barhau i sicrhau diogelwch a lles pobl ar draws y BBC, gan barhau i warchod ein gwasanaethau hefyd. I leihau’r risg, dim ond y bobl sy’n hanfodol i’n hallbwn darlledu fydd yn cael mynediad i adeiladau’r BBC. O ddydd Mercher 18fed Mawrth ymlaen, bydd pob asesiad a chyfweliad yn cael ei gynnal o bell, nes rhoddir gwybod yn wahanol. I gael mwy o wybodaeth, ewch i https://www.bbc.co.uk/careers/