Join a massive website, and make a massive impact
Salary: neg. (according to location and exp.)
Holidays: 34 days (incl. bank holidays)
Location: London NW1 Euston/Kings Cross
Benefits: Bupa, bonuses and much more…
If you’re a product management professional, experienced in building and managing small agile development teams to deliver incredible UX, and if you really get NewsNow and where we want to take it, then we’d love to hear from you.
We are a top ten UK media publisher, with a website loved by millions: a technology company at heart with industry-leading success metrics propelled by a highly experienced multi-disciplinary engineering team that can afford to run lean. Which means today, we offer all the excitement and agility of a start-up, but with the stability and benefits of an established business — we’re still a company where everyone gets to make a massive impact!
Our ethos and news product are well proven, but we’ve huge plans to fulfil our mission to be the best and fastest website for news from all the angles.
So that’s why we’re undertaking the biggest redesign of our homepage in 20 years, introducing whole new ways for our users to interact with and help curate the news, and launching NewsNow.com to bring our unique product to the US market.
We are now looking for a Head of Digital Product who will offer complete commitment to growing and managing the design and development team, managing every movement of the product’s development along its course to achieve our goals.
About the role
You will work with developers, the editorial team and the Founder to specify and prioritise the work of the development team, and make change happen.
This is a role for someone who is prepared to get their hands dirty. You will not just be defining projects but iterating their development, and while you’re not expected to be a designer, you are expected to be able to make great judgment calls on what works and what doesn’t.
You will be able to channel multiple points of view, influence team morale in accomplishing shared goals, and promote an environment of achievement.
As well as the big projects, you’ll need to make time for developments to our ad tech, our analytics, internal tools, for SEO, and for bugfixes.
We run an iterative development cycle, and use agile techniques to develop roadmaps of minimum viable products. Our ‘one-click’ deployment mechanism and high traffic rate lets us release features rapidly to get qualitative and quantitative user feedback and adjust our plans accordingly.
You and your skills
You will play a major part in our continuing success through your zest for software development and UX, combined with a strong sense of responsibility towards our business objectives. You get NewsNow, and you get where we’re trying to take it.
You’re able to identify and appreciate the product’s USPs, since our aim is to broaden the site’s appeal and user base, without alienating its massive existing audience.
You are also:
- Passionate about news and sports, and creating the best product for people who are.
- Experienced in news media or other high-volume web site and knowledgeable about our business model, programmatic advertising and SEO.
- Knowledgeable of agile product development methodologies, and experienced in employing them successfully.
- Able to test ideas and break them down into manageable steps and MVPs.
- An experienced team builder, people manager, organiser and an excellent facilitator. You have the change management skills needed to keep the team and the userbase onboard and involved.
- Hands-on where necessary through application of relevant technical skills.
- Open to new technologies, but not a slave to them: you relish crafting elegant solutions to hard technical and business problems, using whatever is the best tool for the job.
- Someone who thrives in a small, open and collaborative team, where the best ideas can come from anyone. You’re confident and articulate about what you know and what you don’t.
About the company
NewsNow is the UK’s largest independent free-to-web real-time news aggregator. A one-stop shop for news for 15m unique monthly visitors, we aim to be the best site on the web for those seeking news from all the angles. Running stably and profitably since our start in 1997, since 2009 we’ve been experiencing even greater commercial success as an industry leader in programmatic advertising technologies. NewsNow has been ranked among the top ten UK media publishers for news consumed by British people online.
We are always looking for new ways to reward the loyalty of our massive fan-base, and to grow our reach to new people seeking news from all the angles. We are a driver of quality in the news media and today set editorial standards for much of the content we link to.
Our highly experienced multi-disciplinary engineering team can afford to run lean. Our compact set up lets us keep hierarchy and bureaucracy to a minimum. Which means today, we’re still a company where everyone who joins us gets to make a massive impact. In short, we offer all the excitement and agility of a start-up, but with the stability and benefits of an established business.
We run a LAMP stack, which employs mostly OO code in Perl 5, ES5, NodeJS (ES5+ES6), Go, with some C running on Debian Linux, deployed on co-located raw metal and in the cloud. We do our client-side development in HTML5, CSS3, OO JavaScript and jQuery.
NewsNow is also very proud to be the first digital member of the DEC charity’s Rapid Response Network, which helps alert the UK public efficiently to its vital emergency fundraising appeals.
Benefits
- Fully paid Bupa private health insurance
- 34 days paid annual leave (incl. bank holidays)
- Childcare voucher scheme
- NEST pension scheme
- Competitive salary + bonuses
- MacBook
- Flexible/homeworking opportunities
- Choose your location: strategically located offices in London Euston/Kings X or 100% remote
- Cycle to work
- Social activities
- Sabbatical proposals considered after 2 years