New Content Platform team show and tell

We’re hiring a Product Lead for our new content platform

Our online advice helps 29 million people every year. Our vision is “the freedom to create great services and innovate with ease”.

Kylie Havelock
4 min readFeb 8, 2020

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Take me to the job application [Closing date 23rd February]

➛Chat to Kylie about the role

We’re looking for an experienced and practicing senior product person to lead a multidisciplinary team working on our content platform at Citizens Advice; delivering a sustainable, user-led approach to the provision of advice content. The team are at the heart of our organisation’s ambition to deliver our vision for 2022.

We’re growing fast; today, we have 7 multidisciplinary product teams in our London office, split across 4 areas: public advice, adviser-facing services, platforms, and funded programmes. Read our product strategy to understand our goal to connect people with the best advice.

You’ll be working on a platform that underpins multiple services: serving 29 million clients, 6,500 advisers, and 800 staff every year. Your work here will make a huge difference. You’ll be setting the goals, strategy and priorities within our cross-functional platform team, and defining the way millions of people access content from us on a daily basis.

Everyone is welcome at Citizens Advice. We care deeply about inclusive working practices and diverse teams. If you’d prefer to work flexibly, or part-time, we’ll facilitate this — whether to help you meet other commitments or to help you strike a great work-life balance. Several of our leadership team work 4 days a week, and we all work from home regularly.

What you’ll do every day

You’ll develop our product roadmap, collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders, and balancing user needs alongside organisational priorities. You and your team will scale our largest platform to millions of users.

The New Platform team have set the vision of “Freedom to create great services and innovate with ease”. This statement is designed to support the organisation’s Future of Advice strategy.

How?

  • By providing a platform that allows Citizens Advice to create and adapt our products along with the needs of our users.
  • By introducing a structured advice model to our advice content, allowing us to ensure that we are set to deliver products and services that are always highly relevant to our audiences and fit within the circumstances of their lives.
  • By introducing a separation between the creation of advice and the delivery of that advice through API driven content management and standalone frontend products and services, allowing each product to evolve over time and focus on it’s own set of problems or opportunities without encoding too many hard dependencies.
  • By designing for the future to ensure that the introduction of new products and services is far easier than it was before. And supporting a rebuild of our public website, adviser services, and intranet products by the end of March 2021.

This is a unique opportunity to experiment and innovate with new ways of providing the best advice content to millions of people. Read this thread from Nathan Good on how the team is working to prepare our advice for the future:

Nathan Good’s tweet thread about the New Content Platform team

You’ll be:

  • leading the creation and evolution of the product vision, strategy, and objectives
  • discovering, defining, and validating problems presented by user insight, stakeholder priorities, organisational strategy, and technical needs
  • coordinating across complex dependencies to deliver features that improve the overall user experience
  • engaging with teams across the organisation to align plans, understand priorities, and communicate changes with our local offices and users
  • collaborating with developers, technical architects, and DevOps engineers to make sure our services are sustainable and flexible
  • tracking and monitoring product performance and user outcomes to iterate and improve on features
  • taking a responsible and ethical approach, considering the social impact our services create and minimising potential unintended consequences

Apply if

  • you’re passionate about Tech for Good and want to work in an equity-driven organisation solving complex problems
  • you’ve shipped high transactional software products in a large and complex organisation
  • you relentlessly pursue building the best possible user experience and use data to track how you’re doing and make decisions
  • you live at the intersection of user, organisational, and technical needs and know how to balance these when setting direction
  • you’re comfortable with leading a multidisciplinary team* that deals with ambiguity every day, and with taking decisions in uncertainty
  • you have lots of energy for sharing your knowledge; you may have mentored and coached other product people
  • you embrace the value that comes from working in the open and sharing with other organisations
  • you enjoy working with non-technical stakeholders and learning from their expertise
  • you want to be part of a growing product community, at the centre of organisational transformation
  • what we’re doing here at Citizens Advice excites you!

*including user research, design, content, software engineering, technical architecture, delivery, data, and operations

Interested? Know someone who might be?

Let’s have a chat! 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 if you’d like to find out more about the role to help you decide if you want to apply:

  • Monday 17th February between 1pm — 5pm
  • Wednesday 19th February between 1pm — 3pm
  • Friday 21st February between 2pm — 4pm

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.

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Kylie Havelock

Director of Product & Platforms @CitizensAdvice. Prev @GDS_GC @Justice_Digital. Board @LocalWelcome. Fellow @CloreSocial.