Head of Product Delivery

ustwo is looking for a Head of Product Delivery to build something that doesn’t exist here yet.

We make exceptional digital products with our clients, bringing strategy, product, design, research and engineering together to solve genuinely hard problems. Product and Delivery have been two separate disciplines here. The market has moved, the work we’re being asked to do has changed shape, and the two are far more useful to our clients together than apart. So we’re bringing them into a single Product Delivery discipline, and we’re handing it to someone who’ll make it their own.

Product Delivery are the orchestrators. They hold the destination and the route to it, along with every building block in between, and they lead the team and often the client all the way there. That means product strategy, roadmaps and the story work that turns an ambition into something a team can build, alongside shaping and pricing the engagement, then holding scope and change when things get complicated. Design, Strategy and Engineering work alongside them at every step.

It’s a brand new role, and that’s the best part of it. You’ll shape the discipline at the same time as you run it, alongside a team already doing strong work for clients. What product delivery means at ustwo, what great looks like and how we know whether it worked are all yours to answer, and not many roles let you start from a blank page that size.

This is a leadership role above all else. Your impact comes through the discipline and the people in it rather than the engagements you personally run, though we’d expect you in the work often enough to set the standard by example, particularly early on. You’ll bring a clear point of view on where product practice is heading and the appetite to get your hands into the work rather than describing it from a distance.

Where the role sits
The discipline will be around twelve people, spread across London, Malmö and New York, so you’ll be leading people you won’t sit next to. That takes a particular kind of leadership: clear enough that people can act without you in the room, present enough that they never feel managed from a distance. Regular travel to the other studios comes with the job as you embed new ways of working as well as in support of new business activity.
You’ll report to our COO and work alongside the heads of Design, Technology, Strategy, Business Development, People, IT and Finance.

Build one discipline out of two. Product and Delivery here have different histories and different instincts about what great looks like, and both bring real craft with them. Your job is to find what genuinely gets stronger when they come together, then build the discipline around that: its proposition, its craft standards and the shape of the team. Most of the people in it will be hybrid product delivery practitioners, with some leaning one way when a piece of work calls for it, though that balance is something you’ll work out with them rather than inherit from us. This is change work as much as product work, so expect to spend real time on the human side of it. You'll have budget to bring in new people where the discipline needs capability it doesn't have yet, and we'd expect you to be hiring inside the first three months rather than waiting for a perfect picture.

Own how engagements run. You’re accountable for how work across the discipline gets shaped, priced and delivered, and you’ll be hands on where it counts, in the shaping, on the engagements that matter most and whenever a team needs you. That includes the harder parts: scope moving, a stakeholder changing their mind late, a plan that needs rebuilding in a week. You’ll hold the commercial performance of the work your discipline runs.

Set what great looks like. You’ll define how ustwo does product. How we frame a problem, run customer development, decide what to build first, instrument it so we can see what happened and act on the answer. Roadmaps that survive contact with reality, stories a team can build from, and measurement that tells a client something real about their business. Rigour without bureaucracy is the aim, so bring judgement about how much process a given engagement needs.

Lead and grow the team. You’re accountable for the craft of this team and how quickly they’re getting better at it. You’ll set a clear bar, give people honest feedback close to the moment rather than saving it for a review, and back them properly while they grow into more. Where someone consistently isn’t where the role needs them to be, you’ll deal with it fairly and without letting it drift. Hiring, progression and what each level means are yours to define.

Help us win, and represent ustwo. You’ll be in pitches, shaping approaches and explaining to clients how we’d tackle their problem. You’ll build senior relationships on live accounts and spot where an engagement could go further than the brief. We’d also like you out in the industry with a point of view worth listening to, in whatever format suits you.

Keep us ahead of where the craft is going. AI has changed what a small team can do and how fast, and it’s still moving. You’ll bring a clear view of where it genuinely improves product delivery, then put tooling and practice into the team systematically enough that the effect shows up in the work. More widely, you’ll build a team that treats learning as part of the job.

You’ve shipped real products. From customer development and early discovery through to first release, and you stayed for the stretch afterwards where a product really becomes good. You can talk credibly about the things you got wrong.

You’ve shaped engagements as well as run them. Scoping an approach, pricing it, then leading a team to the outcome the client was paying for. You know how scope moves and what to do when a senior stakeholder wants something the plan can’t absorb.

You speak engineer and designer fluently. You don't need to have been either, but you do need to hold your own in a trade-off conversation about technical approach. Same with design: you can read a critique properly and you know which decisions aren't yours.

You’re properly data literate. You know which numbers tell you something for a given product and which ones are decoration. Retention, acquisition cost, lifetime value and how they connect to a client's business case are familiar territory rather than someone else's job.

You know how the tooling fits together. Event taxonomies, analytics and experimentation tooling, and how it's wired up so a team can see what users are doing. Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog or whatever a client runs. You don't need to build it, you need to know when it's telling you the wrong thing.

You have a point of view on AI in product delivery, and evidence behind it. Tooling and practice you've put into a team systematically, and a clear account of what it changed about their pace. You know where probabilistic systems behave differently from deterministic ones and what that means for how you design, test and set client expectations.

You decide without waiting for certainty. Much of this role happens before the answer is obvious. You look for where an engagement could go further, you shape the offer rather than waiting to be asked, and you change your mind in public when new evidence turns up.

People want to follow you into it. You can hold a room, bring a sceptical team along with a change they didn’t ask for, and coach individuals through it. You’re also willing to have the harder conversations early, because letting a performance problem sit is unfair on everyone including the person.

You’re credible in front of clients. You can shape and present an approach in a pitch, handle a senior stakeholder who disagrees with you and build the sort of relationship that brings the next piece of work.

You’ve worked in a product studio, agency or consultancy, and also closer to a single product. Ideally both, though we care more about the range in your judgement than a line on your CV. Studio life teaches you commercial reality; startup or in-house teaches you what it feels like to live with your own decisions for years.

You hold a high bar for craft, and you’re curious. You know what great looks like and you’re honest when work isn’t there yet, in a way that makes people want to go again. You follow what’s changing without being told to, and you build teams where that’s normal.

What success looks like

We won't judge this on the performance of any single project. You'll be measured on the commercial performance of the work your discipline runs, and on how our clients and your own team feel about it.

In your first few weeks you'll have met everyone in the discipline, and by around six weeks we'd like a clear point of view on where the two crafts are strong, where they're struggling and the direction Product Delivery should take. Not a finished operating model, that comes later, but a direction people recognise themselves in and want to get behind. We'll make sure you have the access to move at that speed. We'd also expect you to be hiring inside the first three months.

By six months the discipline should be clear to the people in it. What it stands for, how we cast teams, what each level means and who leads what, settled and communicated properly rather than left to be worked out. Clarity is what lets people move at pace, so we'd rather you got there early and adjusted later than waited until every answer was perfect. By then we'd also expect new people you've brought in to be landing, real change in how teams work visible on live engagements rather than described in a document, and the commercial performance of your discipline's work to be genuinely yours.

By the end of the first year, we’d expect:

• New ways of working that have become the normal way rather than the new thing
• Teams and leaders who deliver well without you in the room, with progression and performance handled openly
• Engagements shaped and priced well, then run in a way that protects both the client outcome and our commercial performance
• Client work that gets measured properly, so we can show what changed and not just what shipped
• AI genuinely built into how the discipline works day to day, with something to point at as evidence
• Senior client relationships that you own and that are opening doors
• A proposition our clients understand and choose us for

The bigger prize is a point of view on product that carries. Clear enough inside ustwo that teams actually use it and sharp enough outside that it shapes how other people think, built for where this industry is heading rather than where it has been. We want clients to choose us because of that point of view, and to stay because of what it's like to work with us once they've experienced it.

The honest test is whether the discipline can do things a year from now that it simply couldn't before you arrived.

We’re employee-owned, which means the people who do the work own the business and share in what it makes. We’re also a B Corp, so how we treat our people, our clients and the world around us is something we’re measured against rather than something we say.

We’re wholly independent too. No parent group setting your targets or holding a view on what your discipline should be, which makes what Product Delivery becomes a genuinely open question rather than a decision taken somewhere else.

Bringing product and delivery together properly is something plenty of studios talk about and very few actually do. You’d be the person doing it, with real room to shape it rather than inheriting someone else’s plan, working alongside the heads of the other disciplines on work that ends up in a lot of people’s hands.