Head of Delivery Full Time NEW

About Us

We are an early-stage AI-native digital products company building a portfolio of intelligent, experience-driven products — spanning B2B and B2C contexts, each with distinct user types, pacing, and product complexity. AI is not a feature we are adding — it is the foundation we are building on. Every product decision, every system we design, and every role we hire is oriented around that reality.

We’re at a foundational moment — the team is small, the ambition is large, and the decisions we make now will shape the company for years to come.

The Role

We’re looking for a Head of Delivery to build and lead our product definition and execution capability as a coherent, intelligent, and continuously evolving system. This is primarily a people leadership role — you will manage, mentor, and develop a lean team of specialists across product analysis, program management, product design, and data analytics. But this is an early-stage company, and we need a leader who is equally comfortable getting close to the work when the situation demands it.

Your job is to ensure delivery operates as a system: deliberately structured, consistently executed, and built for long-term product quality. You translate strategic intent and market signals into engineering-ready requirements. You own the delivery layer — end to end — across two products that share the same delivery capability but serve meaningfully different users and contexts. And you ensure that what gets defined, gets built correctly — every sprint, reliably.

Critically, you will bring genuine intellectual curiosity to this role — particularly around AI. You don’t need to be an AI practitioner. But you need to be the kind of person who actively explores how AI tools can make your team faster, sharper, and more insightful. We expect every member of the Delivery team to be AI-aware — and you set that standard.

You will report to the COO and operate in structured alignment with the Head of Engineering, who owns technical architecture and platform execution. Delivery defines and prioritises; Engineering estimates and executes. That boundary is yours to hold and protect on this side.

Your Team

You will lead a lean, capability-driven team of specialists. Your job is not to do their work — it is to ensure they are unblocked, well-directed, and operating with clear ownership. These are not four parallel tracks — they are four complementary capabilities, and one of your most important responsibilities is creating the conditions where they actively learn from and build on each other.

Every member of this team is expected to be AI-aware — not necessarily an AI specialist, but someone who understands how AI tools can augment their domain, engages with that space actively, and brings it into their thinking and their work. You set that standard.

• Product Analyst — Translates strategic intent into engineering-ready requirements, governs UAT, and tracks competitive signals. Growth path toward Product Manager as roadmap ownership develops.
• Program Lead — Owns sprint health, backlog governance, cross-team dependency mapping, and delivery cadence.
• Product Designer — Owns the full user experience across both products — flows, interface design, gamification mechanics, behavioural design, and data presentation. Not limited to the interface layer.
• Analytics Lead — Generates product intelligence from data — insight communication, dashboard design, and reporting that informs and challenges product decisions. Builder profile; escalates to data science when ML work begins.

As the organisation scales, product-specific leads will join this team and report into this role.

What You’ll Lead

Team Leadership, Cohesion & Hands-On Contribution

You are the primary delivery thinker on the team. You structure systems before sprints get planned. You make sequencing and prioritisation decisions that are intentional, documented, and aligned with long-term product integrity — not just what’s expedient this week. You raise the thinking of everyone around you, not just the quality of what ships. But beyond managing individual specialists, you are responsible for the intellectual fabric of the team. Each person carries deep expertise in their domain — and your job is to ensure those domains don’t operate in isolation.

Product Definition & Feature Innovation

You ensure that product features are well-conceived, clearly documented, and structured for engineering execution. Your team translates inputs from customers, growth, and market signals into unambiguous, engineering-ready specifications. You drive a culture of proactive product thinking — anticipating what the product should do next, not just responding to what has been asked.

Program Management & Delivery Discipline

Your team owns sprint health, backlog governance, dependency mapping, and delivery predictability across multiple parallel workstreams. You ensure execution runs as a system — not through escalation, heroics, or constant oversight. Sprint planning is led by Delivery. Your job is to ensure your team participates substantively — negotiating scope honestly with Engineering, committing to what is achievable, and tracking delivery week on week without exception.

Analytics, Insight & Intelligent Reporting

This is one of the most forward-looking parts of your team’s mandate, and we expect genuine curiosity from you here. Your Analytics Lead’s role is not to produce reports — it is to discover what the data is saying about clients, customers, and product behaviour, and to surface those implications in ways that are meaningful, accessible, and actionable. Reporting and dashboards are the medium; insight is the product.

The boundary with Engineering is precise: Delivery and the Analytics Lead define what the reports mean — the metrics, the logic, the business interpretation. Engineering builds the structures, pipelines, and performance optimisation that surface them reliably.

Product Design, Gamification & Behavioural Design

Design at our company goes well beyond interfaces. We believe that the most powerful products don’t just function well — they engage, motivate, and retain users through thoughtful behavioural design. Gamification is a significant and strategic part of how we think about product experience: engagement loops, progress mechanics, behavioural nudges, and reward systems are first-class design considerations, not afterthoughts.

Experimentation Culture

You will build and sustain a team culture where experimentation is expected, valued, and managed. Not every idea your team develops will go into production — and that is by design. Many initiatives will be exploratory or experimental in nature, intended to test hypotheses, probe possibilities, and generate learning. Your job is to create the conditions where this experimentation happens continuously and rigorously, within a controlled framework that protects core delivery priorities.

Interface with Engineering

The relationship between Delivery and Engineering is one of the most important interfaces in our operating model, and you own it on the Delivery side. This means:

• Nothing reaches Engineering without passing through Delivery first. Every requirement that crosses the boundary must be clearly defined, prioritised, acceptance-criteria tested, and validated — no exceptions.
• You work closely and continuously with the Head of Engineering as a peer. The relationship is collaborative — Delivery defines and prioritises, Engineering estimates and executes, and both directions carry equal weight.
• Engineering constraints, feasibility concerns, and technical trade-offs must flow back into your planning in real time — through structured handoffs, regular joint reviews, and a culture of early flagging rather than late surprises.
• You protect Engineering from unfiltered market noise. Requests and commitments from sales, customer success, or leadership do not bypass Delivery governance and land directly in Engineering. This boundary is yours to hold.
• When genuine conflicts arise between delivery intent and engineering feasibility, you surface them clearly, facilitate resolution, and escalate to the COO when a product-level decision is required.

What We’re Looking For

• 10–15 years of experience spanning delivery, product, or program management — with significant time spent leading teams.
• Demonstrated experience managing a multi-disciplinary team; having led specialists across more than one domain is a strong advantage.
• Proven ability to create cohesion across different disciplines — product, design, data, and execution working as one system.
• Proven ability and willingness to be hands-on when required — comfortable operating at both strategic and execution levels.
• Working knowledge of agile methodologies — Jira, Confluence, sprint structuring, and dependency management.
• Genuine curiosity about AI and how it can augment delivery, product thinking, analytics, and design — not as a passive observer, but as someone actively exploring and building that into how the team works.
• Familiarity with or strong interest in gamification, behavioural design, and engagement-led product thinking.
• A genuine appetite for experimentation — someone who creates structured space for exploration without losing grip on priorities.
• Strong analytical instinct — deeply interested in what data reveals about human behaviour, client needs, and product opportunity.
• The ability to translate complexity and ambiguity into clarity — for engineers, designers, and stakeholders.
• A natural coach and mentor — someone who builds capability in others and takes genuine satisfaction in the team’s output, not just their own.
• Strong communication skills; comfortable interfacing across technical and non-technical teams.

The Engagement

This role begins as an independent consultant contract (6 months, with a 3-month extension option) and is intended to transition into full-time employment for the right person. We are building something with longevity and want this person to grow with us.