Product Strategy & Operations Manager

Welcome to Skills Builder Partnership

There are eight skills that are essential for success in all areas of life. Research shows that they underpin academic progress, support wellbeing and lead to higher skilled, higher paid careers. Unfortunately, those from less privileged backgrounds have fewer opportunities to build these skills. We exist to change the systems that allow this to happen.

Joining Skills Builder is not like working anywhere else. Our team consistently say they have never worked anywhere as collaborative, supportive or mission oriented. We combine the fun and dynamism of a start-up, the professional development opportunities of a corporate, the innovation of a digital native and the social impact focus of a charity.

We are serious about delivering social mobility through our vision that one day everyone builds the essential skills to succeed. That means we are ambitious and set high standards for ourselves. We are reflective, inclusive and supportive.

In practice this means that everyone makes time for others in the team, we get stuck in to solve problems together, we have regular employee surveys where leadership talk through every single suggestion and the whole team is involved in developing our strategy.

We are working toward systemic change by rapidly scaling our approach. The Skills Builder Partnership already consists of over 850 organisations. Together, we delivered over 1.4 million opportunities for individuals to build essential skills in 2020 alone. Our strategy of collective impact means we already have the backing of key sector leaders like CIPD, BITC and the Careers & Enterprise Company.

About the role

As the Product Strategy & Operations Manager, you will be rapidly identifying and developing the solutions that allow us to have an outsize impact as an organisation. You will be working across the organisation, learning and applying agile methodologies so that we can build and deploy at pace.

The person in this role will develop our technical systems and analyse data from various sources. In practice this will involve developing tools in our Salesforce environment, working with SQL databases, conducting analysis in Excel and Python, and figuring out how all these things fit together. You may not yet have these skills; we are looking for exceptional capability and an eagerness to put new skills into practice.

We are looking for individuals who are excited by the prospect of solving problems and developing solutions. The role will be an exciting platform to build on your career as part of a team that will give you the space and support to try new things and pursue projects that interest you. We have a strong coaching ethos, enabling you to develop new technical, professional and essential skills. You will benefit from training and the opportunity to gain qualifications should you want to.

We have big ambitions and your scope to grow, learn and achieve matches that. If you want to benefit from working with an inspiring team, with huge potential for learning, growth and development, we want to hear from you.

Key responsibilities                                        

Insights and strategy

• Work across teams to identify and implement opportunities to improve our programmes and working practices
• Support teams to define, improve and execute lean processes 
• Undertake analysis and research to support the COO and Head of Data
• Support Head of Data with data analytics and research

Product management

• Product manage our internal products and their interfaces with our external products
• Support the Senior Product Associate to scale our external-facing products

Product development

• Get started and progress in software development to manage and build out features of our internal products
• Build our “DevOps” approach, adopting best practices into how we manage our internal products and systems

Operations

• As a key member of the operations team, continually look for ways to improve what we do and how we do it
• Work with the COO to optimise our recruitment, HR and people functions
• Work across the team to further automate finance and ops processes

Benefits

 Salary: £40,000

Progression: Regular development and progression reviews, annual pay and promotion review

Start Date: Flexible (ideally April 2023)

Working hours: Flexible but ideally 40 hours per week

Holidays: 25 days per year, plus bank holidays and potential to buy up to 5 days extra

Contract length: Permanent

Location: London (hybrid) or remote (UK)

Application Process

Applications should be made via our online form - on completion of the online application please also send your CV by email to [email removed - click apply for more details]. This round of applications ends at 9am on 6th March 2023 with interviews taking place on weeks commencing 13th & 20th March.