Fractional Product Practice Leader - 9 Month Contract in Richmond

Who are we? Hi, we’re Tails.com – we turn good days into great years for dogs and their humans. We’re working towards longer lives for millions of healthy, happy dogs by providing tailored nutrition that adapts to each dog’s unique needs. It all starts with a few simple questions about their age, breed, zoomie level and tastebuds. From there, owners can create a personalised meal plan that’s delivered to their door every month. No guesswork, no overwhelm. Just exactly the right care for every dog, every day. It’s pretty clever stuff.

As a certified B Corp, being a responsible business is built into how we work – upholding high social and environmental standards to create better walkies for generations to come. Now, we’re cooking up big plans. Having created an entirely new category in dog food, we have the backing of Purina – one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards these same goals (and a bunch of very smart office dogs, all working on their own thing).

Overview of the job: In this role, you'll cover the product craft and mentoring side of our Director of Product and Proposition's role while she's on maternity leave. You'll work closely with our Head of Product and Product Design and her team of senior product and design leads, giving them a genuine thought partner and advocate. This is a craft and people role. Your focus is how the team works, rather than where the proposition or roadmap goes next, which stays with the existing team. It suits someone who likes making a team better at its job.

Practice means the standards, methods and habits that let a team consistently produce good outcomes, whatever they're working on that quarter. The team has strong foundations already, so the job is building on what's working. You'll do it hands-on, working directly with the team.

This role has two parts:

• Practice process delivery: Developing and improving the processes a modern product organisation needs, bringing your own experience and best practice to establish a shared answer to what good looks like for product management and design. Order and priority to be confirmed, but likely to include:
• Designing and embedding a discovery process the team can run consistently
• Designing and embedding an experimentation framework, covering how tests are prioritised, run and evaluated
• Working with engineering leadership to improve the product and engineering ways of working, and to close the gap between the SDLC on paper and the SDLC as teams actually run it
• Building the team's capability in AI tooling relevant to their day-to-day work
• Building the team's practical capability to connect product outcomes to financial forecasting and P&L management
• Practice mentoring and coaching: Acting as a peer-level thought partner and providing leadership mentoring to the Head of Product and Product Design. Provide practice mentoring more widely across the team as needed. Championing product craft, best practice and standards across the wider organisation. Support the product and designs team through a period of transformation and change. Providing a safe, consistent point of contact the team can bring challenges to. Holding the line on scope so the team isn't pulled into ad hoc work outside its remit.

Skills:

• 15+ years in product, including time spent leading and managing product teams in a permanent senior role such as Head of Product, Director or VP
• Senior product experience spanning both physical and digital product, ideally in ecommerce or retail. Experience limited to simple ecommerce platforms won't give you the context this role needs
• Executive-level credibility in product craft, with the judgement to know the difference between how it's meant to work on paper and how it actually works in a real, constrained business
• Experience working directly with in-house software engineering teams and product trios, not only managing outsourced or vendor delivery
• Strong grounding in discovery and experimentation within modern, agile, dual-track product environments
• Genuine experience acting as a peer-level thought partner or mentor to senior, domain-expert leaders, not just junior mentees
• Excellent, direct stakeholder management
• Comfortable holding a boundary and protecting the team's focus
• Comfortable stepping into an existing team's decisions and direction rather than reshaping them

Also great if you have:

• D2C or subscription business experience
• Experience overseeing both product management and product design practice
• Familiarity with Optimizely or a comparable experimentation platform