We’re hiring a Product Lead

Join our mission and lead the tailored, tactical advice workstream of our product strategy

➛Take me to the job application [Closing date 6th August]

As communities across England and Wales struggle through the COVID-19 crisis, the work of Citizens Advice has never been more important. Our charity was founded in the understanding that we live in an unequal society that has implications for marginalised people — and we’re at the frontline of helping those who need it most. When we say we are here for everyone, whoever they are and whatever their problem, we mean it.

Our data gives us unique insight into the challenges people are facing that we use to influence government policy and regulatory interests. In the last year, we helped 2.45 million people in person, by phone, email, or web chat, and there were over 40 million visits to our advice website. It’s been our busiest year ever, during which we’ve also welcomed a new CEO

Our digital services are seeing record-breaking demand, and we’re responding rapidly to people’s changing needs. Technology has created new ways to serve clients and we must be able to keep pace with internet-era expectations, meeting more demand in a tailored and streamlined way. To support this vital goal, we need brilliant product people to lead our new product strategy.

Product strategy 2021 to 2023

The role

As Product Lead for our content platform, you’ll lead our multidisciplinary product teams to enable flexible, tailored delivery of advice content. You won’t be starting from scratch — we’ve done lots of the hard work to migrate to our new content platform and to structure our content in a way that can be served through APIs and tailored to a user’s specific circumstances.

Looking ahead, we have a huge opportunity to explore new ways of reaching people with our advice content — and we’ve already started experimenting, for example with a new partnership with Twitter to help people with online scams. We’ll also be exploring voice skills, syndication of our content, how we might surface our content to telephone advisers and whether there is potential to use WhatsApp to surface advice in an automated way.

For this role, we’re looking for someone who is passionate about delivering outcomes for users. We love shipping products, but our product community is not a delivery-only function — you’ll be expected to have ideas and opinions (strong and loosely held) and to push for what you believe to be right, in a way that brings people on the journey. You’ll be given lots of autonomy as we continue to push down power to those closest to the work.

As product becomes increasingly central to Citizens Advice’s work, it’s never been more important to draw on the experience of our colleagues from across the organisation — and to build positive, collaborative relationships that create a sense of shared responsibility to modernise our services. We believe this way of working is essential to building a joined-up organisation that can deliver seamless services for users.

You’ll work closely with our Head of Product to create the conditions for great product work. You’ll also be a part of the extended leadership team of our Design, Data, and Technology function, alongside colleagues leading on design, user research, engineering, data, and other technical disciplines.

The content platform team

The content platform team is a multidisciplinary product team who are responsible for building a new platform which supports our public and adviser-facing websites. The content platform will enable new ways to reach people, outside of our website capability, such as voice skills, social media channels and any other devices we believe will deliver good experiences for our clients and advisers — and we’re beginning to explore some of these ideas.

Serving our structured advice content through an API

Our vision is the freedom to create great services and innovate with ease and all the work we do ladders up to this vision. For example, we can now provide personalised, tailored and targeted content to our users and we’re thinking about how we can syndicate our content. Our strategic priorities are:

1. Migrate our content into the new content platform
2. Understand if tailored, tactical advice improves client outcomes
3. Prove the value of the content platform

We’ve started work against all three of these priorities. For example: we’re now testing advice sections in both our public facing and adviser facing websites, and we’re starting work to explore syndicating our online scams helper tool to partner websites in order to reach people where they are with tailored advice.

It’s also important to us that we create a team culture in line with our personal values and the organisation’s mission. We care about:

• Innovation with our content: maximising the potential of our advice content through technology and we care about pushing our content forward and creating value for our clients
• Building equity, diversity and inclusion into our product and our team: we don’t believe we can build an inclusive product without an inclusive team and we hold ourselves and others accountable to that value. This work ranges from ensuring we’re building an accessible product for everyone, to thinking about the power we may hold as a team and a product, and how we can answer problems with clients rather than for them.
• Sustainability: creating a flexible and scalable product and team.

Our Tech Lead, Quinn, has written a blogpost which talks more about our team values and the way we work:

I found a software team that really cares about its users and its people

Equity, diversity and inclusion

It’s really important to us that we embody the principles of equity (over and above equality), diversity, and inclusion — and seek to represent this in everything we do. Having an un-diverse team that doesn’t represent society would risk us designing and delivering products that aren’t inclusive for underrepresented users, are less innovative, and suffer from poor decisions.

We also care deeply about creating inclusive team environments where everybody can be themselves. As a product leader, you’ll be collaborating with others to build an environment in which our teams can do their best work.

We particularly welcome applications from women and people from gender minorities, from black, Asian and minority ethnic people, from disabled people, from people with marginalised or minority neurotypes, and from anyone traditionally underrepresented in technology and the charity sector.

We work flexibly, so our roles often suit working parents and carers, or people returning to work after raising children. You can be based anywhere in England and Wales — and we have great technology and ways of working that support remote working.

Let’s chat!

Interested? Know someone who might be? My DMs are open on Twitter, and you can also email me directly* to find out more.

I’m also holding space for open, informal video calls between 29th June and 9th of July if you’d like to find out more about the role to help you decide if you want to apply.

To book a slot, contact me with your preferred date and time. If you can’t make any of the above, drop me a note and we’ll figure out an alternative.

• No recruiters please. No, really.