Senior Product Manager

Senior Product Manager – Safety Transformation

Role: Senior Product Manager (Interim / Contract)

Duration: 9 months

Location: National

Day rate: Competitive

IR35 status: Inside IR35

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to provide
urgent product leadership for a Safety Transformation programme across a
national prisons digital function.

This is not a single, narrowly defined product. The role
will support the transformation of how safety is managed across prisons, which
may include multiple services, products, policy changes, operational practice
improvements and digital capabilities across the wider safety landscape.

The Safety Transformation vision is to improve safety
through better identification, understanding and response to vulnerability,
risk and harmful behaviour, enabled by improvements to operational practice,
service design and digital capability. The work will focus on how
safety-related risk is identified, understood, recorded, shared and acted upon
across prison environments, including areas such as suicide and self-harm case
management, violence reduction and incentive/support plans, segregation, vulnerability,
harmful behaviour and wider safety management processes.

This role supports a core business strategy priority and a
funded commitment to address safety management across the prison estate. It
will help build the evidence base for future investment decisions and reduce
the risk of underspend or poorly allocated spend across a three-year funding
period.

Who You Will Work With

You will work closely with prison officers, Safer Custody
teams, Governors, prisoner representatives and insight, safety policy leads,
service owners, operational stakeholders, managed service teams and digital
leadership. You will ensure the work is grounded in operational reality and
supports the needs of frontline staff, operational leaders and prisoners.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape
  the product vision, strategy and roadmap for Safety Transformation across
  multiple strands of discovery, experimentation and delivery.
• Define
  and prioritise MVP options for improving safety in prisons, recognising
  that the solution may include digital, service, operational and policy
  interventions.
• Lead
  prioritisation of the managed service team backlog, ensuring effort is
  focused on the highest-value safety problems.
• Align
  product direction with policy owners, service owners, safety stakeholders,
  operational leaders and prison users.
• Ensure
  work meets government digital service standards and is evidence-led,
  human-centred, safe and operationally viable.
• Support
  discovery, alpha and beta activity across multiple strands of
  experimentation.
• Improve
  understanding of data and information flows across core prison systems and
  other relevant platforms.
• Support
  the safe testing, prioritisation and evaluation of new capabilities or
  service changes.
• Prepare
  the work for transition to permanent product ownership, including
  documented roadmaps, backlog, decisions, evidence, risks and stakeholder
  relationships.

Skills and Experience Required

• Strong
  experience setting product vision, strategy and roadmaps for complex or
  high-risk services.
• Proven
  ability to lead multidisciplinary teams and prioritise work using user
  insight, data and organisational outcomes.
• Demonstrable
  experience coaching and mentoring Product Managers, improving capability
  and strengthening product practice.
• Strong
  stakeholder management skills, including influencing senior leaders and
  building agreement across organisational boundaries.
• Experience
  leading products through discovery, alpha, beta and live service using
  Agile and Lean approaches.
• Ability
  to manage risks, dependencies and investment to deliver measurable value
  for money.

Senior Product Manager Capabilities

At this level you will be expected to:

• Lead
  teams in Agile and Lean practices and introduce innovative ways of working
  to achieve the right outcomes.
• Demonstrate
  an advanced understanding of design, technology and data principles.
• Work
  with, and constructively challenge, senior stakeholders.
• Adapt
  your approach to the constraints in play, prioritising and mitigating them
  and turning them into an advantage.
• Realise
  benefits by linking work in progress back to the business case, and build
  business cases based on user needs.
• Lead
  teams through the full product life cycle, choosing the right tools and
  techniques at each stage.
• Keep
  abreast of industry best practice and make operations more efficient.
• Act
  as an escalation point for major operational issues and champion
  operational management across the community.
• Anticipate
  problems and defend against them at the right time.
• Build
  problem-solving capability in others.
• Meet
  the needs of users across a variety of channels, applying strategic
  thinking to provide the best service for the end user.

To apply, please click below or for more information, please contact simon.pickerell@veredus.co.uk