We’re Potato, a cutting edge Digital Product Design business with a pretty unique culture. Due to growth, we are looking for an experienced Programme Lead who can take control of a complex and high profile digital immersive experience project.
We love developing digital products, websites, tools and apps for huge audiences. Our clients include Google, YouTube, Tate to name a few. We are also proud to be a part of the AKQA network.
This role will be Bristol-based (with key stakeholders in London and South Wales) and involve teams from at least 4 different companies (including Potato) to be managed as an overall programme. The design and development programme is likely to last for 18 months minimum with option to extend once the product is in market.
Primary areas of responsibility:
- Consortium interaction and accountabilities
- Government relationship
- Programme reporting – for the Steering Committee and for the various programme streams
- Programme Design and Management
- The multi-party programme management
- Delivery to desired outcomes – commercial, programme, quality, team
About the project…
Potato are a lead partner on a large scale, multi-year digital project to create a state of the art, immersive experience based around an iconic and globally recognised entertainment brand.
The project is an opportunity to define an entirely new depth of experience for future audiences. To achieve new qualities of immersion, we will be using a range of approaches including, immersive technologies, high quality narrative, live immersive production events and an intelligent underlying platform that allows the user genuinely to influence how their experience unfolds.
This is an opportunity to be a key member of a highly talented and diverse team that will be creating something audiences have never experienced before.
The Potato Programme Lead profile…
The Programme Lead will be a key member of a cross-functional product development team that will include a Potato Creative Lead, a Potato Team Coach, Potato designers and engineers, and the Potato commercial team. The wider programme team will also include members of our consortium partner teams. This will include game designers from Tiny Rebel Games, Augmented Reality designers and engineers from Sugar, and Mixed Reality / Immersive designers and engineers from Tin Drum.
The key accountability of the role is the successful delivery of the programme through hands-on planning and management (in collaboration with the team above) from initial concepting, through rapid validation of the concept, to defining the overall programme backlog and ensuring quality deliverables for all programme milestones.
Responsibilities…
- Overall responsibility for the programme delivery
- Validate and achieve sign-offs on business requirements and direction with the programme stakeholders and product leads
- Requirement analysis with product leads and development teams to translate business requirements into backlog items, acceptance criteria, and technical requirements
- Programme management including hands-on project planning, budget planning, sprint planning, sprint reviews, ongoing backlog refinement, and prioritisation of features with the product leads
- Identify and manage risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies
- Ensure adequate quality assurance and mapping requirements to test cases and achieve milestone sign-off
- Establish formal reporting arrangements including budget and commercial reporting and progress reporting to the programme steering group
- Additional reporting required for our interfaces with Innovate UK and the UK Government
Essential skills…
The Programme Manager should be able to:
- Apply quality programme and project management principles and processes
- Apply risk assessment and management principles and processes
- Achieve effective collaboration with all programme participants, negotiate and influence decisions
- Ability to coordinate groups of people towards a common goal in a controlled and measurable way
- Collaborate with the Potato coach to foster safe and engaging environments for the agile delivery teams
- Identify, consider, and actively improve areas related to team wellbeing and performance
- Demonstrate a strong commercial acumen
Behaviours…
- Natural leader and people person
- Team player able to influence bottom up behaviour (without the need to resort to command and control style management)
- Charismatic and open personality
- Honest, confident and reliable
- Problem solver, analytical, objective
- Curious with a passion for all things digital
Qualifications & Experience…
- Demonstrated experience managing / directing programmes of work with budgets in excess of £1,000,000
- +5 years experience as an agile delivery manager or similar, leading the efforts of cross-functional independent product teams
- +3 years experience leading large scale multi-party deliverables
- +3 years experience working closely with or within an agency environment
- Product Lead experience very beneficial but not a requirement
- Experience working with the public sector beneficial but not a requirement
- Although this role requires in-depth knowledge of programme management, team coaching (wellbeing and performance), and agile product delivery (frameworks and practice), formal education and qualifications are not a requirement.
About Potato
At Potato, we think that technology should improve our lives. That’s why best-in-class software development and human-centred design are at the heart of everything that we do. We’re a talented bunch of problem solvers who are committed to finding a better way; delivering smarter products that provide more satisfying experiences and more valuable outcomes for our clients and their users.