Technical BA in Manchester

Contract: Fixed-term, 12 months (full time)

Location: Manchester — office based

Reports to: Directly into Strand’s leadership team

Travel: Regular travel to customer sites across the UK

About the role: We build software that helps investigators get through digital forensic evidence faster. Our users are practitioners with deep domain knowledge and very little spare time, so the quality of what we ship depends on how well we understand their working day. This role sits between those users and the engineering team. You will spend real time with customers — on calls, in workshops and on site — understanding how they work today, where the friction is and what would actually make a difference. You will then turn that understanding into clearly written, well‑scoped work that the engineering team can pick up and build, and keep it moving through delivery until it is live and adopted.

You will also be our delivery lead. There is no separate project manager or scrum master above you — you own the cadence, the backlog and the delivery plan, and you are the person who keeps the team pointed at the right work. It is a hands‑on role: you will own the path a piece of feedback takes from a customer conversation to a shipped change, and you will be the person who can answer 'why are we building this, and how will we know it worked?'

This is a 12‑month fixed‑term contract covering a period of growth in our customer base. There is a realistic possibility of the role extending or becoming permanent, but we are recruiting for the fixed term and will be straight with you about where that stands.

What you will be doing:

• Run the feedback loop. Collect input from customer calls, support conversations, user research and the account team, and maintain a single, deduplicated view of what our users are asking for.
• Write the tickets. Translate raw feedback into well‑formed Linear issues: clear problem statement, scope, acceptance criteria, edge cases and links back to the source. Size and label them so the team can plan with confidence.
• Triage and prioritise. Work with Product and Engineering to separate the urgent from the important, spot the recurring themes behind one‑off requests, and make the trade‑offs visible rather than implicit.
• Close the loop. Tell customers what happened to their feedback — what we built, what we did not, and why.

Requirements elicitation:

• Sit with the customer. Run interviews, workshops and observation sessions with users and stakeholders, including on site. Ask the questions behind the question rather than taking the first stated requirement at face value.
• Document what you learn. Produce user stories, acceptance criteria, data and integration requirements, and non‑functional requirements such as performance, auditability and security.
• Validate before we build. Use wireframes, prototypes and walkthroughs to confirm you have understood correctly, and manage scope and expectations honestly along the way.

Process mapping and analysis:

• Map the current state. Produce as‑is process maps, swimlanes and data flows for how customers work today, including the workarounds nobody has written down.
• Design the target state. Model the to‑be process, quantify where the time goes, and make the case for the change with evidence rather than assertion.
• Analyse impact. Identify what a change means for the customer’s wider workflow, their existing tooling and their obligations around evidential integrity and audit.

Leading agile delivery:

• Own the cadence. Run backlog refinement, sprint planning, stand‑ups, reviews and retrospectives, and keep Linear an accurate reflection of reality.
• Own the plan. Hold the delivery roadmap, make the call on what goes into a sprint, and manage scope and sequencing against customer commitments.
• Unblock the team. Chase down decisions, clarify ambiguity quickly and protect the sprint from avoidable churn.
• Track and report. Maintain delivery visibility for leadership and customers — what is in flight, what is at risk, what has shipped, and where we are against commitments.
• Support release and adoption. Coordinate UAT, contribute to release notes and user documentation, and check after the fact whether the change delivered the outcome we expected.

Essential:

• Demonstrable experience as a Business Analyst, Technical BA, Product Analyst or similar in a software product or technology environment.
• A track record of eliciting requirements directly from customers and stakeholders, including running workshops and interviews with non‑technical users.
• Strong written communication — you can turn a messy conversation into a ticket an engineer can act on without a follow‑up meeting.
• Practical experience of process mapping and business process analysis (BPMN, swimlanes, user journeys or equivalent).
• Experience leading agile delivery, not just participating in it — owning a backlog and sprint cadence and running the ceremonies yourself, without a project manager or scrum master above you.
• Comfortable with issue trackers such as Linear, Jira or equivalent, and with keeping a backlog genuinely well maintained.
• Technically literate: you can hold a credible conversation with engineers about APIs, data models, integrations and constraints, and you know when to ask for detail rather than nodding along.
• Confident working directly with customers, including senior and technical stakeholders, and comfortable delivering unwelcome news clearly and early.
• Comfortable being accountable for delivery outcomes and making prioritisation calls in a small‑team environment where the process is still being shaped.

Desirable:

• Experience in digital forensics, law enforcement, cyber security, e‑discovery, legal technology or another regulated or evidential domain. Domain knowledge is welcome but not required — we will teach you what you need.
• Experience in change management or software adoption.
• Experience supporting UAT, writing user‑facing documentation or contributing to release communications.
• Exposure to public sector or enterprise procurement and the requirements that come with it.
• Relevant certification (BCS, IIBA/CBAP, Scrum) — useful, but experience matters more to us.

Terms and what we offer:

• 12-month fixed-term contract, full time, starting as soon as we find the right person.
• Salary of circa £45,000 per annum, depending on experience.
• Based full time in our Manchester office — we work in the same room as we’re very small, it allows us to support and iterate together, as a team — with monthly travel to customer sites.
• Pension, holiday allowance and the standard package — full details shared at offer stage.
• A small team where your work is visible, decisions are made quickly and the software you help specify is used on real casework.

Strand Intelligence is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and are happy to make reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process — just let us know what would help.