Delivery Manager

Summary

Join Kooth PLC, a rapidly growing digital mental health company, as a Delivery Manager. You will provide hands-on leadership in managing software and technology delivery, ensuring efficient development and on-time, within-budget project completion. This role involves leading product and technology project delivery, managing stakeholder communication, optimizing delivery within squads, and maintaining and developing Kooth's delivery practices. The ideal candidate possesses experience in agile methodologies, stakeholder management, and team coaching. Kooth offers a competitive salary, generous benefits, and a supportive work environment.

Requirements

• Experience of working in agile multidisciplinary teams to deliver high transactional digital products and platforms using agile methodology
• Knowledge and understanding of working in user-centred product teams, with experience of using a range of delivery methods, tools and agile techniques to deliver projects / products within scope, on time and of a high quality
• Familiarity with software development, cloud technologies, and modern development practices (e.g. CI/CD, microservices, DevOps, TDD, continuous and automated testing) and how to integrate them into agile delivery processes. Able to learn and engage with technical discussions to proactively unblock delivery
• Experience in relationship management with the ability to build trust and influence stakeholders to communicate and negotiate successfully, protect and enable teams and generate commitment to shared goals
• Excellent analytical thinking skills, adept at drawing together insights from data, research and stakeholders to help inform decision-making and make tactical and strategic recommendations
• Strong presentation and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex decisions and implications to non-technical audiences
• Experience in coaching teams and/or individuals, fostering self-organisation, continuous improvement, and high performance
• Action orientated, with sound judgement in identifying issues/ blockers and putting forward solutions

Responsibilities

• Lead delivery of products and technology projects
• Manage the delivery of end-to-end software development across 1 to 2 squads. Coordinate efforts across engineering, product management, and other disciplines to drive the delivery of value
• Coordinate planning processes within squads, including sprint and quarterly planning, ensuring that objectives are clear, measurable and achievable. Work with product and engineering colleagues to produce and maintain roadmaps, manage dependencies and set measures
• Take accountability for your squad(s) agreeing and meeting milestones with the wider business and delivering value at pace. Act as the squad’s point of escalation for resolving issues related to your squad delivering
• Lead on delivery processes and ways of working in your squads. Provide the squad with expertise on agile development methodologies, facilitate meetings and processes and upskill colleagues. Build the capability of your squads to work effectively in an agile way based on a deep knowledge and understanding of a range of agile and lean tools and techniques
• Support quality assurance throughout the delivery lifecycle. Work closely with product, design, research and engineering colleagues to ensure squads adopt good practices for discovery, design development, testing, release and monitoring
• Proactively identify, manage, and mitigate risks and issues that could affect delivery timelines, cost, or product quality. This includes anticipating technical challenges, managing dependencies between teams, and addressing roadblocks that may arise during development. Communicate risks clearly to stakeholders and work with squads to create mitigation strategies
• Contribute to managing relationships with relevant partner teams to ensure successful cross-team or cross-organisational delivery, including ability to mediate and facilitate discussions across cross-functional needs
• Provide stakeholders with visibility into project progress, ongoing work and changes. Use visual tools like roadmaps, progress reports, dashboards and burn-down charts to make information understandable and accessible. Ensure that all stakeholders have real-time access to the information they need to make informed decisions
• Act as a bridge between technical teams and business stakeholders, fostering collaboration and open dialogue. Help technical teams understand business priorities, while also ensuring stakeholders appreciate the technical challenges or constraints involved. Encourage cross-functional collaboration through joint planning sessions and reviews
• Proactively communicate risks and issues that may impact project delivery. Provide stakeholders with timely updates on potential delays, budget overruns, or technical challenges. Present mitigation strategies and ensure stakeholders are involved in critical decisions affecting scope, quality or delivery timelines
• Lead by example as a proactive person with a can-do attitude and strong communication skills
• Lead a positive working environment for your squads, in which they are protected and empowered to succeed
• Proactively plan, forecast, estimate and manage uncertainty, contingency planning and pace, use data like cycle time, change failure rate and deployment frequency to understand the capacity and performance of the squad and identify potential delivery issues early
• Act as a team coach and critical friend. Focus on seeking constructive outcomes in discussions and giving and facilitating healthy challenge, while understanding when and how compromise is beneficial to progress
• Monitor and manage (where possible) team dynamics and health, including keeping performance and morale high under any difficult or challenging circumstances
• Build a culture of continuous improvement. Encourage squads to constantly evaluate and improve their development processes, tools, and techniques. Facilitate retrospectives and promote a mindset of learning from successes and failures. Use data and feedback to optimise workflows, reduce bottlenecks, and improve efficiency
• Ensure your squad(s) are equipped with the information they need to perform and deliver value. You understand that the quality of output from a team is highly impacted by the quality, clarity and shared context the team is given
• Maintain and improve our inclusive and diverse culture
• Keep up to date with developments in delivery and agile / lean techniques and methodologies and introduce them to product / project teams to reflect best practice
• Be proactive in maintaining understanding of the work and good practices across disciplines within your squad(s). Display sufficient technical understanding to swiftly remove impediments and communicate between teams
• Contribute to relevant team and organisation-wide forums such as Communities of Practice by sharing expertise and knowledge and gaining new expertise, insight and skills from others
• Contribute to the development of shared resources, like the delivery toolkit

Benefits

• Competitive Salary: Up to £65,000
• Generous Annual Leave: Enjoy 28 days of annual leave, in addition to public holidays, providing you ample time to recharge and spend quality moments with your loved ones
• Professional Development: Benefit from our yearly professional training programmes, tailored to your career aspirations and designed to enhance your skills and knowledge
• Financial Security: Secure your financial future with our pension contributions and annual company share option awards, giving you a stake in the success of the company
• Health and Well-being: Prioritize your health and well-being with our comprehensive Health Shield cover and access to an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). The EAP offers 24/7 telephone mental health support and access to GP consultations, ensuring your mental and physical health are taken care of
• Life Assurance: Gain peace of mind knowing that you're covered with life assurance, providing up to four times your annual salary to your loved ones in the unfortunate event of your passing
• Flexible Working: Embrace the flexibility of remote working, allowing you to create a work-life balance that suits your needs and maximizes your productivity