Principal Product Manager in Leeds

Hippo is a rapidly growing digital consultancy passionate about building and delivering transformative digital solutions for a diverse range of Public and Private sector clients. We are recruiting for a Principal Product Management Consultant to support our mission. We work at the intersection of strategy, design, and technology to solve complex problems and create lasting value. Our collaborative and agile culture empowers our teams to make a genuine impact.

As a Principal Product Management Consultant, you will be a strategic product leader and an experienced practitioner. Your scope extends beyond individual products or delivery teams; you will be responsible for shaping product vision, defining product standards, and driving the successful delivery of valuable, user-centred outcomes at scale. You will lead complex product environments, influence organisational strategy, and ensure product thinking is embedded across technology, delivery, and design disciplines. You will mentor and guide senior product practitioners, contribute to the development of our product capability, and act as a visible leader within both Hippo and our client organisations. As a Principal, you will play a key role in strengthening our product proposition, supporting business growth, and influencing senior stakeholders at executive level. You will bring clarity to complex problems, align teams around outcomes, and drive product direction in high-impact, influential environments.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate compelling product visions that align organisational strategy with measurable user and business outcomes, ensuring clear direction across complex delivery environments.
• Lead the most complex and strategically important product engagements, connecting vision to delivery through clear objectives, prioritisation, and outcome-driven roadmaps.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders, including executive leadership, using data and insight to influence decision-making and shape long-term product and service strategy.
• Drive delivery excellence across multiple initiatives simultaneously, managing dependencies, reducing risk, and adapting agile approaches to suit context and complexity.
• Lead and mentor senior product practitioners, strengthening capability within Hippo's Product community and fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
• Support business growth through pre-sales activity, shaping product propositions, contributing to bids, and helping clients understand the value of product-led delivery.
• Represent Hippo's product capability internally and externally, contributing to thought leadership, community engagement, and the ongoing evolution of our product practice.

Skills and experience you need

Essential experience and capabilities include leadership and mentorship of product teams, hands-on product management in complex delivery environments, defining and communicating clear product visions, end-to-end delivery management, value measurement and data-driven decision making, stakeholder engagement in consultancy contexts, cross-functional collaboration with user-centered design, and experience delivering in public sector or equivalent large-scale private sector environments. You should be comfortable operating in large, complex organisations with governance and competing priorities, and able to manage multiple workstreams and dependencies while maintaining delivery focus. Pragmatic application of Agile principles (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, DevOps) is expected.

What makes us great

As well as a competitive salary which we are transparent about from the outset, you can also expect a range of benefits:

• Contributory pension scheme (Hippo 6% with employee contributions of 2%)
• 25 days holiday plus UK public holidays
• Perkbox access for a wide range of discounts
• Critical illness cover
• Life assurance and death in service cover
• Volunteer days
• Cycle-to-work scheme for the avid cyclists
• Salary sacrifice electric vehicles scheme
• Season ticket loans
• Financial and general wellbeing sessions
• Flexible benefits scheme with options of: private health cover, private dental cover, additional company pension contributions, additional holidays (up to an extra 2 days), wellbeing contribution, charity contributions, tree planting

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Hippo

At Hippo, we are dedicated to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace that works for everyone. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented groups including women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent and people with disabilities. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. We are a registered Disability Confident Employer, Mindful Employer, Endometriosis Friendly Employer and a member of the Armed Forces Covenant. We strive to remove barriers, provide accommodations and offer reasonable adjustments to ensure equity throughout our practices.

Hi, we’re Hippo. At Hippo, we design with empathy and build for impact. We do this by combining data-informed evidence, human-centred design and software engineering. We’re a digital services partner who is genuinely invested in helping our clients thrive as modern organisations. Our delivery methodology is truly agile, from concept to reality, supporting innovation and continuous improvement to achieve your desired outcomes. We firmly believe that technology should serve humanity, not the other way around. We take a human-centred approach to everything we do because we understand that complex problems require a service design approach. This means understanding how users behave and ensuring our solutions work for them in the real world. Our combination of data, design, and engineering delivers bespoke digital services that make a positive and meaningful impact on organisations and society. We’re confident in our abilities, authentic in our approach, and passionate about what we do.

Hippo locations

We are headquartered in Leeds and have offices across the UK in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London and Bristol. We’re on the lookout for top talent nationwide but you need to be located within reasonable travelling distance from one of our offices which will be your contracted office location. Given the dynamic nature of a consulting business, you may be required to work on-site at a Hippo office or at an in/out of town client location for a number of days per week (client dependent) and therefore candidates will need to be open/flexible to travel. We offer relocation support up to £8k to help make your move a smooth one.