Lead Product Owner in Leeds

Division: Data, Technology and Innovation

Salary: National (Edinburgh and Leeds) ranging from £72,100 to £103,000 and London from £79,300 to £113,000 per annum (salary offered will be based on skills and experience)

This role is graded as: Technical Specialist – Regulatory

Role Responsibilities

• Deliver change and operational services through development, maintenance, and operations partners on a complex product, enabling end‑to‑end ownership and stability while giving you the opportunity to work on systems with real scale and visibility.
• Estimate resources, costs, and timelines for product change and shaping prioritisation across the portfolio with senior stakeholders, ensuring informed decision‑making and offering you direct influence over strategic investment and delivery outcomes.
• Deliver technical and service solutions that meet agreed acceptance and definition of ready criteria through agile and DevSecOps practices, resulting in faster, more secure, and higher‑quality delivery while deepening your experience in modern engineering approaches.
• Forecast and track product‑level costs aligned to sponsoring divisions and projects, contributing to budget and recharge processes to support financial transparency and giving you exposure to commercial ownership beyond delivery execution.
• Set, monitor and track performance against key performance indicators to provide clear insight into product health and delivery effectiveness, enabling you to demonstrate measurable impact and continuous improvement.
• Ensure compliance with governance requirements while refining and clarifying stakeholder requirements for development teams, balancing regulatory rigour with delivery pace and allowing you to operate as a trusted bridge between business and technology.

Minimum Skills Required

• Demonstrated experience heading teams of staff and external partners accountable for a complex product throughout the full lifecycle of IT change and operational delivery.
• Extensive service management knowledge, including incident and problem management, across a diverse and complex business environment.
• Solid planning and delivery capability, with significant experience estimating resource, cost, and time requirements, as well as executing capacity, availability and release planning to deliver and run product change effectively.

Essential

• Experience of software application/infrastructure life‑cycle management, and the activities involved in application/infrastructure development/change.
• Knowledge of and exposure to agile development practices.
• Commercially aware, with the ability to understand supplier proposals and promote cost‑effective solutions.
• Solid technical and architectural knowledge across relevant environments, platforms, software industry and business practices with the ability to solve complex problems, make final decisions, restore functionality and deliver effective outcomes.
• Credible and steady leader with experience negotiating with executives and clearly communicating explicit and implicit enterprise trade‑offs, building relationships across the organisation and coaching peers and specialist teams in product management methodologies.
• Strategic yet pragmatic thinker who motivates and leads innovation internally and externally providing industry‑relevant thought leadership while constructively challenging established approaches and focusing on the bigger picture.

Benefits

• 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Hybrid model where employees work a minimum of 40% in the office each month (expectation of 50% for senior leaders); from September, a minimum of 50% in the office each month (expectation of 60% for Directors and Executive Directors).
• Non-contributory pension (8–12% depending on age) and life assurance at eight times your salary.
• Private healthcare with Bupa, income protection, and 24/7 Employee Assistance.
• 35 hours of paid volunteering annually.
• A flexible benefits scheme designed around your lifestyle.