Head of Product Development

Job Description

Title: Head of Product DevelopmentDepartment: Product DevelopmentLocation: Remote (with occasional travel to London/Sheffield)Full time, permanentTes is an international provider of software-enabled services passionate about using technology to make life easier for schools and teachers. All products and services are built with teachers and schools needs at the core, ensuring they are innovative, trustededucation solutions.Role overview:Responsible for the delivery and development of products within a market vertical. Working in tandem with the appropriate Head of Product, be responsible for ensuring the appropriate engineering practices are used to deliver an efficient and effective streamof new product and change; facilitate and encourage cross functional communities of practice across the teams and other verticals; contribute to overall product development strategy.Key Responsibilities:

• Work within a product vertical with product and business owners to ensure that new products or services are delivered to the appropriate levels of quality within the agreed timeframes
• Organise and manage globally distributed Agile delivery teams
• Ensure that the appropriate Agile metrics and artefacts are produced and communicated to enable the teams and product owners to make informed decisions
• Communicate effectively with all product & project stakeholders, ensuring the right information is recorded, reported, and distributed in the correct format, to the right people and in good time
• Collate and present product, productivity and quality feedback to the team and other stakeholders
• Understand the abilities and priorities within the Scrum teams, and encourage and facilitate objectives and improvement around these
• Create high performing teams; resolve internal and external conflicts and establish an atmosphere of success & continual improvement
• Identify the root causes of any delivery issues and work with the teams to introduce corrective actions; remove all delivery obstructions; Mercilessly blast through obstructionswith a smile
• Assist with gathering and clarifying product and project requirements as required
• Work with fellow Heads of Development, Engineering Director and Group CTO as part of the cross vertical Engineering Leadership team to drive, establish and grow the TES one team culture, values, engineering best practices and ways of working across theProduct vertical teams.

What will you need to succeedExperience

• Leadership experience in a Development Manager role or similar running multiple teams
• Demonstrable experience of Agile working. Ability to promote Agile methods of thinking, working and delivery
• Proven track record in the continued optimisation of releases to support frequent high-quality deployments

Skills/knowledge

• Understand the value of agile artefacts and metrics (backlog tracking, burn-down metrics, velocity, and task definition)
• Ability to drive and support technical solution architectures
• Any experience with any of the following .NET, Node.js, LAMP, AWS technologies would be beneficial as would exposure to Kubernetes and Atlassian tools
• First class facilitation and motivational skills to enable the teams to plan, improve and successfully deliver

Competencies

• Shows leadership. Takes ownership and responsibility; Works well within a team; Able to manage by influence
• Have a passion for software development and a good understanding of iterative and incremental software development. Understand the value of delivery commitments made by a development team
• Good written and verbal skills, able to translate concepts into easily understood diagrams and visuals for both technical and non-technical people alike; must have presentation skills
• Eye for detail and quality, able to demonstrate empathy, common sense, and pragmatism. Be innovative and able to relate to both business and technology people

What do you get in return

• 25 days annual leave rising to 30
• 5% pension after probation
• Remote working
• State of the art city centre offices
• Access to a range of benefits via My Benefits World
• Health care cash plan
• Life Assurance
• Monthly Tes Socials
• Access to an extensive Learning and Development menu

Who are TesTes has been supporting the education sector for over a century, growing and changing alongside the evolution of education. Today, Tes is focused on providing digital solutions to support school leaders and teachers with wellbeing, continuous professionaldevelopment, safeguarding, SEND provision, flexibility through timetabling, and pupil behaviour management.Our Vision is to power schools and enable great teaching worldwide, by creating intelligent online products and services to make the greatest difference in education.Tes has over 13m teachers in its online community and working relationships with 25,000 schools in over 100 countries. Tes helps schools find the teachers they need via a range of recruitment solutions; brings new teachers into the profession through initialteacher training; provides teachers with continuous professional development and world class safeguarding training. It also offers a range of expert tools for the classroom from timetabling, SEND provision, and behaviour management solutions to dynamic staffsurveying and wellbeing tools. Tes brings educators together online so they can share expertise and teaching resources and it provides them with vital information, research and analysis about education via its fully digital Tes Magazine. Tes is a global company employing over 600 people and operating across 10 offices, including in London, Sheffield, Hong Ko...