Lead/VP of Product

Inovia Bio is a TechBio company on a mission to eliminate the slow, expensive way drugs get developed. We give biotech and pharmaceutical teams big‑pharma capability with biotech resources: our technology platforms and expert advisory services compress work that traditionally takes months into days and weeks. We operate across two tightly connected divisions. Our consultancy division works directly with pharmaceutical and biotech clients on development strategy, evidence planning, and data analysis. Our tech division builds the platforms that make that work radically faster and, increasingly, products our customers use directly. The insight from one side powers the other: every client engagement teaches us what the industry needs next, and every product we ship makes our advisory work sharper. Turning that flywheel into a deliberate product strategy is what this role exists to do.

You will be the connective tissue of the company. Inovia sits at the intersection of medical science, commercial reality, and software and today, the dots between those worlds are connected informally by the founders. Your job is to own that function: to absorb insight from our medical and commercial teams, sit in front of customers and users, and convert everything you learn into a clear, ruthlessly prioritised product strategy and roadmap that the tech team can execute against with confidence. This is a leadership role. You will work directly with the founders, own product end‑to‑end, and set the direction others build toward. It is also a hands‑on role; there is no product organisation beneath you yet. You will write the strategy, run the discovery calls, make the prioritisation calls, and be accountable for what ships and why.

What you will own:

• Product strategy: a coherent view of where our products are going and why, grounded in evidence from customers, the market, and our own consulting engagements.
• The roadmap: a single, prioritised view of what gets built, in what order, that the whole company understands and believes in.
• Prioritisation: you are the person who says no. Every input stream (medical, commercial, clients, founders, engineers) will generate more ideas than we can build. You weigh evidence, apply logic, and make the call.
• The voice of the customer: structured discovery with customers and users, so decisions rest on what the market actually needs rather than what is loudest internally.
• Translation into build: crisp problem definitions, requirements, and success criteria so the tech team builds the right thing the first time.
• On‑time delivery: Inovia never misses a deadline. You are personally accountable for hitting the dates on the roadmap you own, running planning and tracking that surfaces risk early enough to act on it.

What you will do:

• Set and continuously refine the product strategy and roadmap across our platform products, working directly with the founders.
• Embed with the medical and commercial teams: extract what they are learning from client engagements, sales conversations, and the science, and turn scattered insight into structured product evidence.
• Talk to customers and users constantly: discovery interviews, feedback sessions, and shadowing real workflows in pharma and biotech organisations.
• Run a disciplined prioritisation process: frame options, weigh impact against effort and strategic value, document the reasoning, and communicate the decision including what you are saying no to clearly.
• Work day‑to‑day with the engineering team: shape problems, write clear specs and acceptance criteria, make scope trade‑offs quickly, and unblock decisions so momentum never stalls.
• Define what success looks like for each product bet, instrument it, and be honest about what the data says including killing things that are not working.
• Balance the two sides of the business: ensure the product roadmap serves both the consultancy division (internal leverage, faster delivery) and the productised platform ambitions (scalable revenue).
• Bring structure to how product decisions are made at Inovia, so the process outlives any single conversation.
• Run agile delivery end‑to‑end: own sprint planning, backlog grooming, and release cadence with the tech team, and hold the line on dates once they are committed.

What great looks like in 12 months:

• There is one roadmap, everyone knows what it is, and everyone can explain why each item is on it.
• The tech team spends its time building things with clear rationale and defined success criteria not guessing at requirements.
• Customer and user insight flows into product decisions through a repeatable process, not ad‑hoc anecdotes.
• The founders have confidently handed over product ownership and spend their time where only they can add value.
• At least one product bet has been validated (or honestly invalidated) with evidence.

About you:

• Significant product management experience, including ownership of strategy and roadmap not just feature delivery ideally in B2B SaaS, data products, or technical platforms.
• Fluency with the pharmaceutical/life‑sciences domain, or demonstrable ability to get fluent fast: you will be in conversations about clinical development, evidence generation, and real‑world data, and you need to hold your own.
• Radical rationality in how you think about product and strategy. You reason from first principles, structure ambiguous problems cleanly, separate signal from noise, follow the evidence over ego or internal politics, and can always articulate why not just what.
• Real prioritisation muscle: a track record of making and defending hard trade‑off decisions between competing stakeholders.
• Expert in agile ways of working: you can run and adapt sprint planning, backlog grooming, and iterative delivery cycles, and instil that discipline across multiple teams so execution stays fast and predictable.
• Strong customer discovery skills: you have run user interviews and turned qualitative insight into product decisions.
• The ability to communicate at every altitude: a medical director, a commercial lead, an engineer, and a customer should each come away from a conversation with you feeling understood.
• Comfort with ambiguity and small‑company reality: no playbook, no army of analysts, high ownership.

Nice to have:

• Experience in pharma, biotech, health‑tech, a CRO, or life‑sciences consulting.
• Experience as the first or most senior product person in a startup or scale‑up.
• A technical or scientific background (or enough depth to engage credibly with data science and engineering teams on how things work, not just what they do).
• Experience with products that blend services and software, or with productising a consultancy.

Who you will work with:

You will report to the founders and work daily with the medical team (deep drug‑development and evidence expertise), the commercial team (client relationships and market signal), and the tech team (the engineers and data scientists who build our platforms). You will also spend meaningful time with our customers' development, medical affairs, and evidence teams at biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Hiring process: intro call → deep‑dive with founders → practical product exercise → meet the team → offer

Salary: £100,000+ depending on experience.