Programme Manager B2C

The Economist's B2C business is how most readers meet us: written content, podcasts, narrated articles, video, all on and off-platform. Building premium experiences for The Economist’s premium offering is what excites us. Changing any of that means moving product, engineering, marketing, editorial and commercial at the same time - which makes these the largest and most visible programmes The Economist B2C business runs.

The role

We are hiring a Programme Manager to own these programmes end to end. This is not a coordination role: you will hold the plan, chair the governance, hunt the dependencies before they bite, and tell senior people the truth early when something slips.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end delivery of B2C's most important programmes, across product, engineering, marketing and editorial. This is not a coordination role: you are accountable for ensuring what's required to deliver business value ships on time, on budget and within scope. You will work with a single accountable Business Sponsor, Engineering Lead and Product Lead (or combination of these) for every programme.
• Get deep enough into the business case, the technical solution and the contributing teams to lead the programme directly rather than report on it.
• Break the programme into named workstreams with named owners, and hold the integrated plan, critical path and dependency map across them.
• Hunt dependencies before they bite, scheduling fragile work such as end-to-end testing, migrations and design review with realistic lead time.
• Maintain a single source of truth per workstream: programme decisions, risks, and a plan people trust more than their own notes.
• Commit only what is understood. Dates and scope do not go to stakeholders while the uncertainty behind them is still open. A date offered to relieve pressure in the room is a date that will be wrong in reality.
• Chair the programme's governance (Team of Teams, Business Design Authority, stakeholder syncs and Go/No Go) and own the flash report, the decision log and the escalation path. 
• Communicate openly and early, including where there is bad news, setting out impact, cause and the proposed response.
• Make operational readiness part of done, ensuring support teams have runbooks and understand expected behaviour before launch.
• Resolve cross-pillar resourcing and sequencing conflicts, and hold third parties to the same standard as your own teams.
• Put in place the means to track benefit realisation after launch, and close the programme with a retrospective that produces preventive actions.

Who you are

• Experience leading large, multi-team programmes to a public launch date, where product, engineering, marketing and commercial had to deliver together, rather than workstreams or projects inside a single squad.
• Technically literate: able to follow an architecture discussion, test an estimate and ask informed questions of engineering teams.
• Commercial judgement: comfortable partnering and questioning the business case, assessing what a programme is worth and what would need to be true for that value to hold.
• Comfortable holding accountability for delivery across team boundaries, including where a programme is at risk.
• Confident working with senior stakeholders, able to make the case for unwelcome decisions such as a change of scope or date, and reach a decision.
• You apply AI to your own work. Expect to be asked what you have automated in your own practice and what you have learned recently.

Also useful:

• Experience in consumer subscription businesses: pricing, entitlements, paywalls, transactional journeys and app-store release cycles.
• Fluency in Jira, Jira Advanced Roadmaps and Confluence.
• Experience managing third-party and vendor delivery within a larger programme.
• Experience in media or publishing.

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