Arbor Education

Head of Portfolio – Product & Engineering

Arbor Education

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: United Kingdom

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Salary

💰 £85,000 - £95,000 per year

Job Level

Lead

About the role

  • Own and evolve the Product & Engineering portfolio processes, ensuring they remain simple and effective as the department grows in size and complexity
  • Lead and coach a small team of Delivery and Programme Managers, leveraging them to oversee high-complexity or commercially critical initiatives that require specialized cross-team coordination
  • Stay on top of Engineering capacity, providing data-backed insights to help mitigate risks, make trade offs decisions and seek future investment
  • Measure and optimize the end-to-end Product Life Cycle to reduce cycle time and accelerate time-to-market, ensuring every initiative and milestone delivers measurable value impact.
  • Proactively map complex dependencies and capacity plan, mitigating cross-team or cross-departmental dependencies that threaten roadmap commitments
  • Facilitate operational portfolio meetings, ensuring everyone is always aligned with commercial OKRs and making data-backed decisions on what to start, stop, or pivot
  • Support R&D leadership with business casing and scenario modelling for budget cycles, and partner with finance to ensure we’re making impactful resourcing decisions (e.g. staff capitalisation)
  • Support autonomous teams in ensuring their initiatives are sufficiently granular and timely to provide iterative value-unlocks
  • Identify systemic bottlenecks across the Product & Engineering ecosystem and work with leadership to implement interventions to increase throughput and quality
  • Build and own the reporting systems that provide visibility on commitments without introducing burdensome manual processes for teams

Requirements

  • Proven experience directly managing Delivery, Project and/or Programme Managers within a scaling Product and Engineering environment.
  • A track record of operating portfolio functions during phases of rapid & significant growth, without slowing down development speed.
  • Technically fluent enough to be able to understand product and platform engineering complexity to identify risks and propose trade-offs.
  • The ability to challenge leadership effectively, using data to drive consensus on difficult prioritization calls and resource allocation.
  • A strong belief that delivery ownership sits with teams, not a central function; you can demonstrate collaborating and enabling others vs. controlling them.
  • Highly confident configuring Jira (or similar) to provide high-level portfolio visibility without increasing friction.
  • Comfortable navigating the tension between many "commercially critical" requests and long-term technical debt or platform stability.
  • Strong experience successfully implementing new processes in a culture that values autonomy/outcomes and dislikes "red tape”.
  • Strong analytical skills with the ability to build dashboards that track leading indicators of delivery health, not just lagging metrics.
Benefits
  • A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
  • 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
  • Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
  • Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks
  • Private Dental Insurance with Bupa
  • Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
  • Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
  • 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
  • Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching)
  • All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
  • Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
  • Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
  • Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
  • Dog friendly offices!
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
portfolio managementproject managementprogram managementdata analysisscenario modelingcapacity planningprocess optimizationrisk managementdashboard creationvalue measurement
Soft Skills
leadershipcoachingcollaborationcommunicationanalytical thinkingproblem-solvingdecision-makingadaptabilityinfluencingnegotiation