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Job Description
Head of Product
Department: Product
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Manchester, UK
Reporting To: Tom Walters
Description
Interact provides enterprise-grade intranet software that connects over three million employees to leading global names like Levi's, Domino’s, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and Technicolor.
Our team of customer-focused problem solvers are passionate about helping organizations to communicate better. We do this together by constantly working to improve every service and product we offer. With offices in Manchester, New York, Dubai, Tulsa, and Warsaw, we operate across North America, EMEA, and Australia.
Click on any of our vacancies and you’ll see one thing in common – they all begin with this message. Why? Because at Interact we treat everyone with the same respect and honesty. Whether you’re a developer fresh out of college or a seasoned salesperson, we live the motto that we uphold for our customers: our people are our most valuable assets.
We are currently looking for a Head of Product, who will be an exceptional operator and, just as importantly, a coach.
In this role you will report in to the VP of Product, you will run the product management function and own the product quality bar: the engine that turns the vision set out by leadership into market-leading shipped product.
We are currently looking for a Head of Product, who will be an exceptional operator and, just as importantly, a coach.
In this role you will report in to the VP of Product, you will run the product management function and own the product quality bar: the engine that turns the vision set out by leadership into market-leading shipped product.
This is deliberately not a second product-visionary seat. The VP of Product authors the small number of surfaces that define what the product feels like, increasingly as working prototypes, and is otherwise out of the detail. You will run everything else, with trust that is graduated rather than assumed: you will start with regular sign-off points with the VP of Product, and the explicit goal is for these to become show-and-tell moments rather than genuine review as you demonstrate your grip. It is the same self-obsoleting mechanism you will run with your own team, applied to you first. The role only works for someone who actively wants the autonomy at the end of that path.
Your craft will be twofold. You will build the operating rhythm of the function: knowing where every project is, what is next, what is blocked, and what decisions are pending, without anyone having to ask; agreeing engineering budgets upfront and keeping us on track against them; and holding a no-surprises standard for course-correction and early warning. And you own the product quality bar: defining what good looks like for consistency, UX, and craft, coaching it into the PMs until it is their reflex rather than your review, and making sure bad work dies as a wireframe, not as shipped product. You will lead the Product Managers and the Delivery Managers; the DMs own the project-management mechanics, and your job is the grip on that machinery: directing it and interrogating what comes out, rather than running it yourself.
You will be measured on three things above all: that leadership always knows the state of every project without asking, that nothing user-facing ships below the bar, and that pace holds. Developing the PMs is how those three scale; autonomy is the means, not the goal. You will inherit how we operate and make it hum; this role is not a mandate to redesign the process, and the product vision is authored elsewhere.
A little about you...
- Proven experience as an operator-coach: leading product teams in a high-execution, fast-paced environment while making the people around you better
- Has coached a direct report to the point of trusted, independent decision-making, and can explain exactly what told them it was safe to step back.
- Track record of raising a team's quality bar so that it held without them in the room, with rejection at their review becoming rarer over time.
- Experience owning delivery end-to-end across multiple concurrent initiatives, with a focus on shipping outcomes rather than producing artefacts
- Can critique product cold and with precision: shown an unfamiliar screen, sees quickly what is wrong, why it matters, and what they would do about it
- Experience agreeing budgets and scope upfront and holding delivery to them, including surfacing deviation early
- Can interrogate, reconstruct, and defend an engineering estimate in front of leadership: knows what is in the number and why, and never relays a figure they cannot explain
- Background in B2B or enterprise SaaS, ideally with complex, multi-tenant, or AI-heavy products
- Exposure to high-ownership cultures where individuals are expected to operate with autonomy
- Genuine fluency in current UX and UI standards, conventions, and design trends, with the confidence to say “not good enough” with precision
- Solid technical grounding, ideally from a technical or computer-science background: able to interrogate engineering effort and cost rather than taking “it's complex” at face value, and never snowed by an engineer without needing to be the deepest one in the room
- Eval rigour for AI and probabilistic features: knows how to define and measure “good” rather than pointing at usage, and treats evaluation as the new specification Fluent with modern AI tooling and energised by what it makes possible, both in how the team operates and in what we build
- Strong customer research and synthesis skills: turning many conversations into clear, weighted input for decisions, with strategic accounts carrying the most weight
- Understanding of fixed-time, flexible-scope delivery and how to run product at pace without heavy planning machinery
- Knowledge of working within cross-functional teams, particularly across Product, Engineering, and Quality
- Execution-focused operator who thrives on pace, ownership, and delivery
- Transparent by reflex: surfaces bad news early and in plain language, course-corrects in the open, and treats being wrong as cheap and being late as expensive
- Makes honest flagging safe for the team by how they respond when someone brings them a problem
- Low ego: builds the team and the engine and is excited to win as a team
- Bilingual under pressure: absorbs top-down pressure and turns it into clear, well-formed work rather than transmitting it downward as churn
- Highly proactive and self-directed: unblocks themselves, does not wait for permission, and brings solutions rather than complaints
- Curious, optimistic, and improvement-driven, constantly looking for ways to do things better and faster
- Clear and confident communicator, able to align both technical and non-technical stakeholders
About the role...
- Run the operating rhythm of the product function: know where every project is, what is next, what is blocked, and what decisions are pending, without leadership having to ask
- Own the product quality bar and embed it in how the team works: define what good looks like for consistency, UX, and craft, coach it into the PMs until it is their reflex rather than your review, and ensure quality is interrogated at concept stage, before engineering effort is spent, rather than discovered at release. You remain the final check on user-facing work, but a healthy function rarely needs you to use it
- Hand PMs real, reversible decisions to own, providing context and unblocking teams so most work runs at pace, while coaching the reasoning and the bar behind each call
- Course-correct with early warning: notice drift early, flag it plainly with a recommended path, steer work back or stop it without sunk-cost attachment, and ensure nothing reaches leadership or a customer late
- Own the talent bar and the team's growth: coach, stretch, and develop each PM deliberately, delegate by default, set high standards, and put in the development work that makes excellence reachable
- Drive pace over planning: a bias to shipping, fixed time and flexible scope rather than endless estimating, and the active dismantling of fear-based overplanning
- Maintain shared ground truth: real progress, real risk, and real user behaviour visible to everyone, with engineers as close to real users as PMs
- Engage customers with discipline: regular direct contact and research, synthesised into weighted evidence for prioritisation, with weight given to strategic accounts rather than the most recent or loudest voice, and never allowing a single call to redirect a squad
- Agree engineering budgets and scope upfront with the VP of Product and stakeholders, then hold the line: flag moving estimates or unagreed work immediately with options, never letting deviation run silently
- Partner credibly with Engineering on architecture and trade-offs, ensuring effort and complexity are genuinely understood rather than accepted at face value
- Embed quality as part of the definition of done with the Quality team, with acceptance criteria defined early and timelines that do not squeeze testing
Benefits
- 25 days annual leave (with the option to buy and sell additional days)
- Cycle to work scheme
- Access to Learning & Development platform
- Life Insurance
- Auto Enrolment Pensions
- Healthshield (Cashback on dental check-ups and fillings, eye tests, physiotherapy, prescriptions and much more
- Reimburse for usage of personal mobile phone
- Free Gym membership and Free Friday lunch for office based staff