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 Channels and Product Excellence product area. The scale of the BBC’s web presence is vast: we serve more news and sport traffic than anybody else in the world, supporting more than a billion visits in December 2021; we aim for broadcast levels of availability at 99.95%; and our web vitals are amongst the best in the industry. You’ll be leading the development of in-house cloud-native web and app assembly and presentation system that secures this traffic and resilience, and building the range of tools which ensure our products are built with excellence. Our aim is to move all of our website on to this stack, to enable experimentation and personalisation at scale, to increase publication speed, and to keep pace as our audiences grow. And you’ll be at the heart of this, leading the teams providing the foundations on which the BBC online is built.

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: London OR Salford OR Glasgow OR Newcastle OR Cardiff

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/

About the Company

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity. 

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here