Digital Production Lead (Hardware Retail Experience essential)

Chesamel Group is an agile consultancy headquartered in London, focused on driving extraordinary growth for forward-thinking businesses through innovative, bespoke solutions. The team challenges traditional thinking to deliver transformative business outcomes using human ingenuity and advanced technology. We listen with intent, connect brilliant minds, develop bold ideas, and create solutions so our partners achieve extraordinary success.

The Team Chesamel has a large team of marketing experts delivering on client projects across the globe, ranging from fully integrated and embedded consultancy to ad-hoc on demand project delivery. You will be joining a collective focused on delivering excellent client servicing while leading business transformation for our clients.

About The Role: As this smart hardware retail store account continues its strategic growth, the onsite production team operates across multiple critical verticals (including New Product Introductions, Marketing Campaigns, Merchandising, and Content Hub). To ensure seamless execution, this role serves as the primary operational anchor and player-coach for the onsite team. The mission of this role is twofold: 50% of the focus is dedicated to managing the day-to-day operations, capacity, and output of the cross-vertical production team, ensuring delivery excellence and strict QA standards. The remaining 50% of the focus requires the candidate to act as an active delivery partner, executing hands-on digital production projects alongside the team during peak cycles.

Core Responsibilities:

• Onsite Team Leadership & Operations (50% Focus)
  • Cross-Vertical Team Management: Act as the direct operational lead for the onsite digital production team. Oversee day-to-day workflows for team members dedicated to different store verticals, keeping them aligned with overall account goals.
  • Capacity Planning & Traffic Management: Proactively map, pre-plan, and manage the team’s weekly bandwidth. Strategically shift resources and reallocate producers between verticals to support high-priority workstreams during peak volume periods (e.g., product launches or Black Friday sprints).
  • Delivery Excellence & Final QA Gatekeeper: Maintain ultimate accountability for the team’s output. Serve as the final Quality Assurance (QA) checkpoint, auditing front-end digital placements, promotional matrices, and localized content before it reaches the client.
  • Operational Rhythms & Governance: Lead internal team touchpoints (stand-ups and status reviews) to unblock traffic lines and track project statuses using clear criteria (Where is the project? What are the hurdles? What are we waiting on?)
  • Inter-Agency & Client Liaison: Act as the central operational point of contact for internal Google marketing departments, PMMs, and external agency partners, shielding the production team from unnecessary overhead.
• Hands-On Digital Production (50% Focus)
  • End-to-End Project Execution: Step into the production pipeline to personally manage and execute digital production projects from briefing through to live deployment.
  • Asset & Content Production: Work directly within Web Production environments, content management systems (CMS), and staging platforms to build, update, and deploy store assets alongside the team.
  • Launch & Sprint Support: Take on dedicated production tasks during high-intensity sprint windows, providing the team with extra execution bandwidth to guarantee on-time publishing.

Top Three Must Have Skills:

• Experience & Subject Matter Expertise
  • Hybrid Leadership Background: Minimum of 5–7 years of experience in digital production, with at least 2–3 years in a team lead, traffic manager, or operational management role within an agency or enterprise marketing environment.
  • Cross-Vertical Oversight: Proven experience managing creative or technical teams working across multiple concurrent project streams or different brand categories.
  • Hands-on Production Knowledge: Strong roots in execution—the candidate must still possess the skills and desire to build projects, push updates, and work directly in the tools.
  • E-Commerce & Device Retail Operations: Experience navigating the complexities of large-scale e-commerce, consumer electronics/device retail, web production, asset deployment, and multi-market localization workflows.
• Technical Skills & System Knowledge
  • CMS & Web Production Platforms: High proficiency working inside enterprise content management systems (headless CMS platforms, page builders, or product detail tools) to execute web content updates.
  • Project Management & Traffic Software: Advanced mastery of enterprise tracking software (e.g., Smartsheet, Wrike, Asana) to manage multi-resource capacity and project timelines.
  • Bug Tracking Tools: Comfort using enterprise issue-triage platforms (e.g., Buganizer or JIRA) to log, track, and resolve system and publishing anomalies.
• Core Competencies & Interpersonal Attributes
  • The "Player-Coach" Mindset: A rare balance of leadership authority and tactical execution. This individual is equally comfortable steering high-level operational strategy and formatting assets in a CMS.
  • Ecosystem Command: The ability to direct internal teams, external agency partners, and clients with confidence, ensuring timelines are protected in high-pressure environments.
  • Laser-Focused Technical Precision: Exceptional attention to detail when auditing complex promotional logic, legal text disclaimers, and web layouts.

Client Culture Considerations:

• Intuitive Self-Starter & Proactive Learner: This environment moves too fast for a formal, slow onboarding process. The candidate must be someone who intuitively drives their own learning, asks the right questions, figures out systems quickly, and takes immediate ownership of their onboarding.
• High-Pressure Resilience & Dynamics: Must possess a calm, steady demeanor under pressure. Launch windows shift, assets change last minute, and dependencies break—the candidate needs to view these dynamics as the norm, navigating ambiguity without getting flustered.
• Client-Facing Diplomat with ability to mentor junior team members: Must be highly client-facing and polished enough to handle tough conversations with stakeholders. Internally, they need the emotional intelligence to lead, mentor, and balance a production team made up of both highly seasoned producers and more junior execs.