Head of Product - Multiple Opportunities

As the NHS celebrates its 75th year using digital technology to support citizens, patients, clinicians and researchers has never been more critical to its future.

Driven by the recommendations of the Wade-Gery review, NHS England Transformation Directorate has the mandate to deliver a broad, complex set of products, platforms and services which play a vital role in the delivery of health and care across the country every day.

Our products and services are central to supporting NHS patients, staff, researchers and the public, as well as to achieving critical national health and care goals – as demonstrated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The work we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, helping them access the essential services they need and supporting them to get appropriate care as quickly as possible. Operating at the scale of the NHS offers unique opportunities to shape the future of health and care.

We are growing our Product Management capability to ensure our products and services deliver real value for their users and continuously improve to better meet their needs.

With this in mind, we have range of exciting opportunities for Heads of Product to support multidisciplinary teams across our Product & Platforms sub-directorate.

Our Heads of Product:

• Engage with leaders in policy & strategy to explore and prioritise the outcomes that products within their portfolio need to achieve

• Ensure the strategy for the product portfolio is driven from an evidence-based understanding of the real needs of users whilst supporting national policies and transformation strategies

• Enable their multidisciplinary teams to deliver effectively by ensuring they have a clear understanding of priority outcomes to achieve, the autonomy and support needed to deliver outcomes effectively and strategies and plans that are responsive to continuous learning

• Track the performance of products through relevant success measures, metrics and KPIs, and other sources of feedback or insight and where appropriate uses these to inform future direction of work

• Use their experience, expertise and position within organisational leadership to nurture the sustainable growth of product delivery capability in their area - creating the conditions required for user-centred design, agile product delivery and engineering practices to successfully mature

Our product portfolios include:

Digital Citizen Health – delivering citizen-facing national digital channels and services including NHS.uk, NHS App, and NHS login.

Digital Primary Care – delivering new capabilities to support the digital transformation of primary care and wider community pharmacy, optometry and dentistry.

Digital Urgent and Emergency Care – ensuring best use of digital technology in urgent and emergency care to get patients the right help, in the right place, at the right time.

Screening and Vaccinations – delivering the next generation of digital services to support the national screening and national vaccination and immunisation programmes.

Enabling Products – delivering digital interoperability across the providers of the wider health and care system, including core national products to enable secondary care appointment management (Wayfinder), bookings, referrals, prescriptions, child protection, child health and medicines management.

Demographics – provides and manages the register of NHS numbers and associated demographic patient data used by all authorised health and care professionals when providing direct care.

Clinical Data Sharing – provides the ability for authorised health and care professionals to securely access, share and be alerted to a range of clinical information, for the purposes of direct care.

Core Services – provides the tools and services to enable product teams to build and integrate technology in the health and care system. This includes tooling to understand and develop new software, using national APIs and integration services to interoperate with other systems across health and care.

Cohorting – provides the platform to identify patients safely, repeatably and transparently, to support NHS population health objectives.

Staff and Citizen – enabling verified, authorised users to securely access either their own or their patients’ clinical information - including Cyber Products, Digital Staff Passport and Digital Staff App.

As a Head of Product you will:

• Lead cross-disciplinary, user-centred agile teams developing and maintaining a range of high-profile digital products and services

• Develop relationships with key stakeholders across a range of organisations and internally with colleagues across NHS England

• Nurture a culture of collaboration with the mutual goal of delivering best in class digital products

• Engage and inspire teams to continually innovate and improve

• Monitor and understand delivery progress, anticipating and mitigating potential issues and risks

• Develop clearly defined and visible high-level objectives for products and teams

• Communicate effectively with stakeholders, colleagues and suppliers

Some of the skills and experience we’re looking for: 

• Extensive experience and advanced practical understanding of product and programme management methodologies - including agile methods and other structured project & programme management approaches

• Significant experience in user-centred service design practices and methodologies for both public- and staff-facing and internal services and applications

• Qualifications or equivalent experience demonstrating proficiency in product or digital project & programme management

• Proven ability to transfer and develop skills and knowledge into new areas at short notice 

As a flexible employer, we want to support you to work in a way that is best for the NHS, our patients and you. Talk to us about how we might be able to accommodate a flexible working arrangement whether that’s a job share, part time, hybrid working or another flexible pattern.

All of our Product Management roles have a specified office base (London, Leeds or Exeter), however we remain committed to supporting flexibility around workplace locations. If it works for the service, we will do our best to make it work for you.

As we have Head of Product opportunities across Leeds, London and Exeter we are running multiple adverts, you need only apply to this advert to be considered for any location.

Please apply if you are interested in becoming a Head of Product at NHS England - we will have further information on specific available roles to discuss with you at interview stage.

Please note when completing your personal statement (via the Apply button) that your application will be assessed against the following criteria:

• How you have provided multidisciplinary teams with a balance of clear strategic priorities and the autonomy to determine specific solutions in response to continuous learning

• How you have used your experience, expertise and position within organisational leadership to nurture the sustainable growth of product delivery capability

• How you have tracked the performance of a group of related products against key outcomes through relevant qualitative & quantitative success measures, metrics, KPIs or other sources of feedback

We strongly recommend that your personal statement include examples that address these criteria.

We are a great place to work. What we do matters.

From April 2023, NHS England, Health Education England and NHS Digital became one single organisation, putting workforce, data, digital and technology at the heart of our plans to transform the NHS.  Our mission, to use data and technology to improve lives remains and we are currently recruiting critical, priority roles. Successful applicants should be aware that roles may be subject to change in the new organisation.

NHS England leads the NHS in England to deliver high quality care for all. We support NHS organisations to deliver better outcomes for our patients and communities, work to get the best possible value for taxpayers, and drive improvement across the NHS. This includes improving the health of the population and the quality of care, tackling inequalities, and delivering care more efficiently. 
 
Our outstanding teams are passionate about technology and public service, making use of everyone’s skills to improve people’s lives.

We collaborate to deliver world class tech and intelligence, so come and join us. We are committed to sustainability, diversity and inclusion; our people are at the heart of what we do.

To find out more about the type of work we do, please take a look at our website.

We value the different experiences our people bring to their work. We're working to create an environment where everyone can make a full contribution no matter their background, identity, or circumstances.  Which means, we encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and abilities.  

Our work matters. You matter.

What we offer you:

• we're moving to a hybrid working approach which offers you an informal, flexible way of blending home and office working
• flexible working opportunities - we value and respect the diversity of our employees, and applications from prospective candidates who require flexible working arrangements are welcomed; these include part-time hours, job sharing, flexible hours and part-remote set ups
• 27 days annual leave increasing to 33 days with service
• a generous pension (with our contribution equal to 20.6% of your earnings)
• NHS Discounts including shops, restaurants, gym, mobile phones, and insurance
• employee benefit schemes including our Season Ticket Loan, Car Lease and Bike to Work schemes

Next steps

Interviews will take place from w/c 23rd October. Applicants who are shortlisted for interview will be contacted by email.

To view further information please see the attached role profile.

If you require a reasonable adjustment or support with your application, please contact [email protected] 

This post is not exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. We only ask applicants to disclose convictions which are not yet spent / unspent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. Following an offer of employment, we will carry out a Basic Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check as part of the pre-employment check process.

We have approved the external recruitment of this business-critical role on a permanent basis. This decision was made through the established recruitment controls process and endorsed by key HR stakeholders. The team has explored alternative resourcing options which has proven to be an unviable option due to the specialist technical skill set required to carry out this specific role