Head of Portfolio

At Arbor, we're on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts, giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity – but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education every day: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

Location: Remote

Salary: £85,000 – £95,000

About the role

As Head of Portfolio, you will partner with Product & Engineering to drive our ongoing ways of working evolution, ensuring we become increasingly more effective at shipping customer value as we rapidly scale. You will achieve this through both your operational leadership and by guiding your team of Delivery and Programme Managers on the most critical initiatives. We value simplicity and pragmatism over 'by-the-book' processes, strongly believing that delivery and reporting should be owned by product and engineering leaders, not a central PMO. Success in this role will require collaboration from the exec to the front line to ensure Product & Engineering deliver on their commitments, while relentlessly embedding a culture focused on outcomes, not outputs.

Core responsibilities

• 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 optimise 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.
• 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.
• As the need arises take hands-on accountability for critical programmes working in a player-manager capacity.

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 prioritisation 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.
• Comfortable being hands-on when required with recent examples of directly steering critical programmes of work.

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!

Interview process

• Phone screen
• 1st stage
• 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at careers@arbor-education.com.

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice.

Equal Opportunities

Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation. Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive – whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.

Refer a friend

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: careers@arbor-education.com

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.