Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO) (Brighton)

As our Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO), your role is pivotal to the current and future success of BrightLocal. As a product-led growth (PLG) business, we live or die based on the quality and value of our product to our customers.

As our CTPO you are ultimately responsible for ensuring that our products deliver incredible value and reliable infrastructure that meets our customers’ changing needs better and faster than our competitors.

Technology and innovation are at the core of our business. You will facilitate technological advancements and foster a culture of innovation, ensuring we stay ahead of industry trends and deliver cutting-edge solutions. Your leadership in this area will be crucial in maintaining our competitive edge and enabling sustainable growth.

You will play a central role in the business, owning the customer experience and collaborating with senior leaders to set the product and technical vision and strategy.

This is a hybrid role where we would require you to be in our Brighton office 2 times a week.

Vision and Strategy:

• Deeply understand and appreciate the needs, challenges, and opportunities faced by our customers and employees.

• Work in collaboration with the C-Suite, Head of Product and Engineering Managers to craft a clear and compelling long-term vision for our products and services that meet the needs of customers better than any of our competitors.

• Devise a simple and effective product strategy that delivers maximum value to customers, and strong commercial growth to the business over the short-medium term.

• Ensure that the product vision & strategy is aligned with our mission and enables the business to continue to grow in a sustainable, profitable manner.

• Ensure that the technology strategy aligns with and supports the overall product vision and business objectives.

• Take every opportunity to communicate the product vision to the business, ensuring high levels of understanding and buy-in within every team.

• Foster a customer-centric culture in the business, proactively sharing all insights and ensuring feedback from all customer-facing teams is used to inform product decisions.

Product Delivery:

• Guide and support your Head of Product and Engineering Managers (direct reports) to ensure we deliver on our strategy as quickly and effectively as possible.

• Ensure that we have clear and robust processes at all stages of the product and engineering life-cycle, from ideation and validation to development, testing, feedback, and iteration.

• Foster a culture that balances being data-driven with a bias for action and risk-taking, enabling us to deliver incremental value to customers quickly and often.

• Empower your team to own and manage the product roadmap, ensuring the wider business has a clear view and understanding of progress and changes at all times.

• Ensure you have the right blend of talent, experience, and team structure to enable your team to successfully execute the product and technical strategies.

• Collaborate closely with the Head of Product and Engineering Managers to establish efficient processes for product development, decision prioritisation, and product launches.

• Collaborate closely with the Engineering Managers and Engineering team to ensure we have the right tools, processes, and ceremonies for fast and efficient product delivery.

• Establish product and technical KPIs for cross-functional alignment; examples include customer satisfaction scores, uptime, etc.

• Foster a culture of innovation and iteration, ensuring testing and data-driven decision-making is a priority, utilising test results and insights to shape impactful products.

• Oversee the architectural integrity, scalability, and security of our technology platforms to support our product and business goals.

• Support the Engineering team and work with them to help them adopt best practices in coding, testing, and deployment to ensure high-quality product delivery.

• Build effective relationships and working processes with marketing, sales, Customer Success, and Customer Support to ensure we bring new products and updates to market effectively.

Team Leadership:

• Embody and champion our company beliefs every day and be a role model to everyone in the business.

• Working with the Head of Product and Engineering Managers, you'll nurture a high-performing team through regular check-ins and 1-1s.

• Inspire the Product and Engineering teams (engineers, QAs, product managers, UX designers, scrum masters) and guide their thinking and actions from design to delivery to feedback and iteration.

• Lead the team to meet roadmaps and objectives through effective management and communication.

• Ensure individuals reach their potential by providing thought leadership and investing in continuous improvement and career growth.

• Drive a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.

• Mentor and develop the Product and Engineering leadership team, including the Head of Product, Product Leads, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leads, to enhance their skills and career growth.

You’ll need to be:

• A role model for our culture and beliefs: First and foremost, you are a leader of the business and nothing is more important than being a constant role model for our beliefs.

• An inspiring leader and supportive manager: You know what it takes to build high-performing cross-functional teams and help team members reach common goals and their full potential.

• A true player-coach: You’re comfortable working strategically and looking at the big picture while also being hands-on and close to the details.

• Open-minded and hungry to learn: You know how to deliver commercial success in software businesses, but you don’t have all the answers all the time and are prepared to admit this, ask questions, and learn from those around you.

• A great collaborator: A strong desire to collaborate with engineers, product marketing, and the commercial team who are responsible for building and developing product partnerships to ensure a cohesive and aligned approach to achieving sales objectives.

• An excellent communicator: You know how to engage and inspire people through written and verbal communication.

• A strong bias for action: You’re comfortable working with ambiguity and lean on your creative problem-solving skills to generate ideas and move them forward quickly.

• Great with analytics: You’ll have strong analytical skills with the ability to analyse data, identify trends, and extract actionable insights.

• Big ambitions: You lead by example and will energise the team to take big swings that help move us forward faster.

• A technical visionary: You’ll have a deep understanding of modern software development practices and technologies.

• An advocate: You’ll champion agile methodologies and engineering best practices to foster a collaborative and efficient engineering environment.

You’ll need to have:

• Extensive experience in B2B SaaS software development and leading Product and Engineering teams in a fast-growing environment.

• Prior experience in a CTPO or CTO role with a focus on product.

• Proven track record of successfully creating and executing a strategic vision.

• Demonstrable experience across the whole product lifecycle.

• Extensive experience of working with Agile development methodologies and in particular SCRUM.

• Demonstrable experience of improving existing processes and teams to deliver fast and effective product delivery.

• Proven track record of designing and implementing scalable and secure technology architectures.

• Familiarity with our product and tech stack: Linux, React, PHP, Golang, Jira, GitHub, monday.com, MySQL, Elastic Search, TestRail, Jenkins, Redis, RabbitMQ, REST APIs and microservices.

• Understanding of on-premise and cloud infrastructures.

• A passion for technology and innovation.

For more information or to review a full JD please contact Christian – christian.saade@brightlocal.com (no agencies)

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