Senior Delivery Manager, Kooth
£68-80k
Senior and Expert level
Remote from UK
Effective personalised digital mental health care platform
Job no longer available
Effective personalised digital mental health care platform
201-500 employees
HealthcareB2CB2BMental healthWellbeingMedTech
Job no longer available
£68-80k
Senior and Expert level
Remote from UK
201-500 employees
HealthcareB2CB2BMental healthWellbeingMedTech
Company mission
Kooth's mission is to create easy to access online mental health services that work alongside you to provide compassionate and effective support.
Role
Who you are
- Experience of working in agile multidisciplinary teams to deliver high transactional digital products and platforms using agile methodology in a complex, multi-stakeholder organisation
- Deep knowledge and understanding of working in user-centred product teams, with extensive experience and expertise using a range of delivery methods, tools and agile techniques to deliver projects / products within scope, on time and of a high quality
- Strong understanding of software development, cloud technologies, and modern development practices (eg CI/CD, microservices, DevOps, TDD, continuous and automated testing) and how to integrate them into agile delivery processes. Able to participate in technical discussions, offer constructive input and proactively unblock delivery
- Proven expertise in relationship management with the ability to build trust and influence stakeholders at all levels 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
- Excellent presentation and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex decisions and implications to non-technical audiences
- Proven ability to coach teams and individuals, fostering self-organisation, continuous improvement, and high performance
- Action orientated, with sound judgement in identifying issues/ blockers and putting forward solutions
What the job involves
- Reports to: Head of Delivery
- The Senior Delivery Manager provides hands-on leadership in managing software and technology delivery, ensuring that software products are developed efficiently, meet business objectives, and are delivered on time and within budget
- By fostering collaboration, promoting agile principles, mitigating risks, and empowering teams, the Senior Delivery Manager ensures a high level of technical quality and value-driven delivery
- Lead delivery of products and technology projects - 40%
- Communicate with and manage stakeholders - 25%
- Optimize delivery in squads - 25%
- Maintain and develop delivery practice at Kooth - 10%
- 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
- Lead 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
- Take a lead role in relationships with relevant partner teams to ensure successful cross-team or cross-organisational delivery, including ability to mediate, manage and facilitate discussions across complex, high-risk, time-constrained or challenging scenarios
- 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
- Manage external contractors / agencies as required
- 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. Proactively share learning across Product and Technology
- 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
- Be proactive in challenging and improving organisational processes where they impact the pace of the squad
- Maintain and develop delivery practice at Kooth
- 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, and act as a consultant for other teams when appropriate and agreed with the Head of Delivery
- Be proactive in maintaining a strong 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
- Play a leading role in 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
- Be an effective communicator, able to engage with and influence senior internal stakeholders to shape the role for Delivery as a whole at Kooth
Application process
- Close date: 24/1/25
Our take
Kooth offers free at the point of access mental health care to more than 5.4 million people via NHS commissioners, corporates, social workers, GPs and schools across the UK. It provides a mix of community-created content, forum sessions with other community members, and one-to-one counselling via online chat. All users sign up anonymously for the free-of-charge service and there's no digital tracking of session IP addresses. The aim is to provide a safe space where each person can get the support they need.
As a pioneer in online counselling, Kooth brings together emerging technologies with innovation in clinical practice and evaluation to create new models of care in mental health. The 2020-hired CEO Tim Barker’s data science experience will prove very useful in exploring whether there are patterns in its historic dataset that can be helpful to future users.
Kooth’s 2020 IPO came at a time when London listings were sparse. A testament to the important contribution its services can make at a time when businesses are becoming more conscious of the need to foster well-being in their employees and in the wider world. This is further exemplified by the 33% soar in share prices after a contract was announced to serve 13 to 25-year-olds in California.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
10% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- 28 days (plus Public Holidays)
- Yearly professional training programmes structured around you
- Pension contributions
- Remote Working
- Healthshield Care plan
- EAP programme, 24/7 Telephone Mental Health & GP
- Annual company share option awards
- Life Assurance (up to four times the amount of your annual salary)
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- Incapacity Income Protection
Company HQ
Paddington, London, UK
Leadership
Tim Barker
(CEO, not founder)Worked previously as the CEO at DataSift and in Platform and Go-to-Market strategy at Meltwater after the company's acquisition of DataSift. Became Kooth's CEO in 2020.
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