Head of Product Propositions - Partnerships

Collinson is the global, privately-owned company dedicated to helping the world to travel with ease and confidence. The group offers a unique blend of industry and sector specialists who together provide market-leading airport experiences, loyalty and customer engagement, and insurance solutions for over 400 million consumers. Collinson is the operator of Priority Pass, the world’s original and leading airport experiences programme. Travellers can access a network of 1,500+ lounges and travel experiences, including dining, retail, sleep and spa, in over 650 airports in 148 countries, helping to elevate the journey into something special. We work with the world’s leading payment networks, over 1,400 banks, 90 airlines and 20 hotel groups worldwide. We have been bringing innovation to the market since inception – from launching the first independent global VIP lounge access Programme, Priority Pass to being the first to sell direct travel insurance in the UK through Columbus Direct and creating the first loyalty agency of its kind in the travel sector with ICLP. Today we still invest heavily in innovation to ensure that we continue to deliver superior customer experiences. Key clients include Mastercard, American Express, Cathay Pacific, British Airways, LATAM, Flying Blue, Accor, EasyJet, HSBC, Chase, HDFC. Our mission is focused on doing good beyond profit, which for us means we seek out opportunities for our people to share in our success and that we give back to the communities and people within which we work. Never short of ambition, the success of our business is delivered through the diverse and talented team of over 2,200 global colleagues.

The Role

As Head of Product Propositions - Partnerships, you will drive our product strategy for our Partners by enhancing how the products and services they provide are positioned to, and redeemed by, our customers and help grow and broaden the range of Partner products and services available to our customers. Accountable for delivering the Partner Product strategy, the role is responsible for building solutions across travel experiences partners, leading innovation across different customer touch points and launching products by building cross-functional multi-disciplinary teams, ensuring alignment of responsibilities. The Head of Product Propositions - Partnerships also acts as a thought leader and seeks out and develops close relationships with key strategic partners and internal stakeholders. In this role you’ll be responsible to ensure visibility on the KPIs, know and act according to the market trends in order to maximize the ability to deliver partner value and increase satisfaction. You will contribute to a product strategy in line with the vision for the product, manage the flow of work through the full product-development lifecycle and help to ensure the right work gets done in the right way, at the right time. You will be responsible for the recruitment, development and management of an empowered product team, who will help you execute the product strategy. As the Head of Product Propositions - Partnerships, you will lead a team that works on high, impactful problems and business opportunities that are critical to improving the experience of our Partners and how our customers connect with their products and services.

Ideally you’ll have experience in the following:

• Product Strategy: Define and develop an innovative product roadmap, and create buy-in for the product vision both internally and with key partners; Partner with key stakeholders to define product strategy and provide them with regular business updates; Be comfortable presenting your strategy and roadmap to people at all levels of the company.
• Product Execution: Drive the definition and ongoing management of high-quality outcome-focused product roadmaps based on product vision and strategy; Drive product launches by working with company leadership, engineering and other product management team members; Deliver high quality business requirements documents and functional specifications on identified product changes, secure sign-off across multiple groups and senior stakeholders; Define new features, functionality, and services that improve the Partner experience; Work with development and technical project teams on creative solutions that provide the right balance between speed and quality; Establish, refine and implement mechanisms to ensure cross functional alignment and establish clear escalation mechanisms; Deliver the detailed requirements to the development team and work together on delivering them according to a committed schedule and priority; Be responsible for timely delivery of high-quality products in accordance with mutually agreed project plans; Negotiate and set milestones and expectations with other departments; Evaluate trade-offs, align and enforce decision making to ensure timely delivery and operational efficiency.
• Data Driven and Customer Centric: Work with business partners to perform deep data driven analysis of businesses to surface actionable insights and product requirements for the business; Analyse the product's market performance, market data, competitive intelligence, customer and partner input, internal professional and technical support services and other key data sources to define the prioritize the product features; Measure and connect initiative-level outcomes to key metrics that identify the success of your product area, and value for the business entirely. Ability to assess and explain the point of diminishing returns; Develop and maintain a thorough understanding of customer needs, championing UCD practices across the business; Understand the customer journey and work to identify improvements on an on-going basis.
• Influencing People: Be the thought leader and champion for the organisation, communicating capabilities, functions, and experience across the organisation; Partner and gain alignment with key stakeholders at the executive level across the company; Communicate with and involve senior leadership in insights and analysis regarding trends in partner space; Look for opportunities to provide support and advice to junior team members and mentor them to help guide the execution of the project. Actively build the capability of others through relevant, timely balanced feedback; coaching and teaching, encouraging mentoring relationships; and using recognition and rewards to reinforce desirable behaviours; Communicate progress and work with teams with dependent programs. Ensure delivery of assigned organizational goals. Schedule and secure resources and manage cross-functional teams to deliver these goals; Evangelize each release to other departments and efficiently assess its quality.

Knowledge, skills and experience you’ll need:

• Proven experience in product management leading consumer products, demonstrating increasing levels of responsibilities.
• Experience in managing consumer facing products.
• Experience in agile methodologies, OKRs, rapid prototyping and full stack pods to deliver customer products.
• Proven experience of defining and owning product roadmaps and requirements.
• Excellent data analysis.
• Experience in making data-driven product decisions and building business cases around it to get a buy-in.
• Experience working with low-fidelity tools (whiteboard, Balsamiq) to design product functionality of the project and its features.
• Well-versed in stakeholder alignment and keeping a project on track.
• Strategic thinker able to partner multiple stakeholders for cost/value analysis.
• Proven ability to establish rapport, credibility and influence others to drive results across a large organization.
• Strong management skills with ability to manage and balance multiple priorities and escalate risks and seek decisions early.
• Solid decision making and prioritization skills.
• Experience overseeing and managing complex production schedules; good problem solver.
• Independent and self-organized.
• Ability to manage influence through persuasion, negotiation and consensus building.
• Inherent drive to support colleagues and clients alike, with strong interpersonal skills.
• A track record of developing and mentoring great talent and building and motivating teams.
• Strong written and oral communication skills and a strong ability to facilitate discussions and deliver presentations.
• Experience in the travel industry is a plus.
• Generate innovative solutions to common problems, exploring opportunities to ‘do things differently’.
• A proven record of building exceptional products that meaningfully solve the most important problems felt by Consumers and achieving the business results.
• Significant experience of product management experience, ideally with digital-first consumer propositions.
• Proven, scaled product management in a product-led company.

Collinson is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes differences in all their forms including: colour, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, family status, age, individuals with disabilities and people from all backgrounds, cultures and experiences as we strongly believe this contributes to our on-going success. We are focused on continually evolving our purpose driven, high performing culture, providing an environment where our people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and do interesting and meaningful work. Our company values are: Take Action, Do the right thing, One team and Be insight led. These help guide everything we do internally in terms of how we think, act and interact, right through to how we deliver value to our customers and clients.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example - she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc). If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at ukrecruitment@collinsongroup.com.