Lead Product Manager

Join a team at the heart of the global economy! The Department for Business and Trade ("DBT") and Inspire People are partnering together to bring you an exciting opportunity for a Lead Platform Product Manager. You will lead the transformation of the DBT Platform ensuring the platform is robust, secure, scalable and efficient. You will own the roadmap to achieve this vision ensuring it aligns with the department's digital transformation goals. Salary between £67,170 - £87,264 (including allowances) plus excellent Civil Service benefits including 27% pension contribution. Salary is dependent on location and technical skills as assessed at interview. Flexible, hybrid working from London, Cardiff, Darlington, Belfast, Birmingham, Salford and Edinburgh.

About the role

This is a technical and strategically critical role within the Technology portfolio at DBT, overseeing a large and complex platform that supports both internal and external services. You will lead the transformation of the DBT Platform ensuring the platform is robust, secure, scalable and efficient. You will own the roadmap to achieve this vision ensuring it aligns with the department's digital transformation goals. This requires collaboration with technical architects, engineering leads, cyber security and platform users. As part of the Product and Delivery Leadership Team, you'll play a key role in shaping how they work across DBT, bringing your experience of technical operations and leading platform teams. You'll work closely with colleagues across DDaT to understand the organisation's future needs and help teams validate and deliver against them.

You'll also lead on communicating your team's work to ministers and senior Civil Service leaders bringing clarity, insight and impact to the conversation. This is a technical leadership role requiring experience with cloud-hosted platforms. The successful candidate will be well-versed in implementing and optimising a DevOps culture and supporting teams to work in this way. You'll have experience of introducing end-to-end automated testing, deployment pipelines, and introducing performance metrics like DORA, and then acting on the findings to drive efficiency and excellence. You will also demonstrate AI literacy and an understanding of emerging technologies, enabling them to guide innovation and resilience across the platform. Crucially you must have a proven track record of leading large-scale platform operations and ideally, infrastructure products, ensuring stability, scalability and strategic alignment with organisational goals.

Main responsibilities

You will:

• Lead the transformation of the DBT platform ensuring long-term resilience and scalability
• Deliver a future-state platform while maintaining stability and continuity of existing services
• Develop and own a compelling product vision and roadmap, balancing user needs, technical capabilities and business value
• Champion agile delivery and DevOps culture across multiple teams, embedding modern engineering practices
• Represent the platform at senior boards, providing clear, strategic updates and influencing decision-making
• Lead, coach and develop a team of experienced product managers, fostering a culture of high performance and continuous improvement

It is essential that you have:

• Proven experience leading platform and/or infrastructure products at scale
• Strong technical literacy, including experience with cloud-native architectures, DevOps practices, and large-scale web operations, eg Software or Platform as a Service (SaaS and PaaS)
• Experience working with a diverse group of stakeholders - including at senior levels - and engaging directly with users, with the proven ability to identify a common set of needs and priorities across stakeholder and user groups
• Experienced in agile methodology and applying an agile mindset to all aspects of your work. You can work in a fast-paced, evolving environment and use iterative methods and flexible approaches to enable rapid delivery
• Experience of developing and selling a product strategy to secure funding and support for your products, including drafting and presenting business cases, articulating costs and benefits, and translating technical concepts for non-technical audiences

Benefits

If you join DBT, you will get:

• learning and development tailored to your role
• a flexible, hybrid working environment with options like condensed hours
• a culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%
• annual leave starting at 25 days rising to 30 days with service
• three paid volunteering days a year
• an employee benefits programme including cycle to work

If you are interested in finding out more about this role, please apply using the link provided or reach out directly to Keesha Paulsen.