Software Development Manager in Lea

The Software Development Manager will be responsible for heading up a number of our product teams. Our suite of products helps our customers manage their venue operations more efficiently, enabling effective booking, reservation and management to gain greater control over seating, staffing, and stock procurement forecasting. You and your teams will operate with a large degree of autonomy, with choices about process and technology stack. You will be responsible for ensuring your teams remain aligned with the overall technology and product strategies, striking the right balance between consistency and flexibility. You will enable the success of your products, which includes operations (uptime, performance, user experience) and successful delivery of product roadmaps (features). It will be your responsibility to co‑ordinate the cycle, release, and sprint planning activities of your teams in co‑ordination with the Product Management teams. You will ensure the teams are effectively delivering against plans through an effective and structured monitoring and reporting framework. You will keep a strategic view of the demands on, and limitations to, the products and use this to constantly improve the operations of the product.

Responsibilities

• Through your teams continually deliver products or projects using the appropriate agile project management methodology.
• Ensure the team performs to its optimum capability while maintaining good practice, achieving high quality, and low turnover; own the continual improvement plan for the team.
• Lead the collaborative, dynamic planning process across all your teams – prioritising work against capacity and capability of the team within each Planning Cycle, including both technical and non‑technical backlogs.
• Continually report on progress of planning cycles using appropriate Agile KPIs such as Release Burndown charts, Cumulative Flow, and Lead Time analysis, feeding this information into continual improvement plans.
• Manage dependencies both within and across domain areas of our Product Suite where requirements cross boundaries.
• Ensure Architects and Tech Leads effectively shape requirements to the right level, enabling the team to be clear on architectural and technical considerations.
• Facilitate inclusion of wider Zonal stakeholder requirements into the backlogs, e.g., Zonal Security and Zonal Technical Services.
• Enable and foster a culture of innovation and professionalism within the team, with clear ownership and accountability and pride in deliverables and customer impact.
• As a Line Manager, recruit, develop, coach, motivate, and performance‑manage those in your team, especially regarding pragmatic and effective implementation of Agile Methodologies.
• Participate actively in the Product Delivery community, sharing and re‑applying skills and knowledge, bringing in best practice.
• Work with your teams and the Product Management function to help define sprint roadmaps, ensuring delivery timescales are achievable, realistic, and commercially viable.
• Ensure your teams can provide the necessary support, in and out of hours, to our customers. Drive improvements in this support.
• Build a technology function where teams and products are loosely coupled but tightly aligned – avoiding tight dependencies that make delivery complicated while ensuring all products improve the overall solution and head in the same direction.
• Balance consistency and flexibility: give teams freedom in process and technology choices, but enforce consistency where appropriate.

About Zonal

The Zonal group are one of the UK’s largest technology providers to the hospitality industry. Our products are used by over 17,000 pubs, restaurants and hotels. Customers include national brands like Pizza Express, Greene King, Harvester and Butlins. We provide our customers with the solutions they need to make their business a success. These solutions include mobile apps for ordering and web apps for engaging with consumers either through loyalty or reservations. By linking these solutions to Zonal’s EPoS (till) system, we help hospitality brands understand their customers’ behaviour and preferences, enabling them to excel in an increasingly competitive market.

If you have booked a table or hotel room, ordered, and paid for food and drinks, received loyalty offers, or downloaded your favourite hang‑out’s app, you have likely used a Zonal product. We are a family business with Scottish roots. We operate from our head office in Edinburgh, our Midlands office in Staffordshire, and our Innovation Centre in Abingdon.

What We Value

Passion, Teamwork, Innovation, Professionalism, Accountability and Customer Obsessed are the values we believe make us the company we are. We’re looking for someone who understands great culture and will help us shape it as it evolves. Smart, inspiring, forward‑thinking people who thrive on building solutions for complex problems. We are very much a family company, not just in name. Zonal people work together and look out for each other. Trusted to be accountable, you’ll find that everyone around you shares a passion for delivering value to our customers and striving to always do better. We provide a flexible working environment with a culture to help everyone achieve their best.