Product Coach

We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us. We offer a great work life balance. You have the opportunity to work at any of our brand-new Regional Centres and to also work remotely. Contracts vary in length dependent upon the project with the possibility to extend.

Your time spent with us short or long term will be invaluable - your skills and expertise are needed to deliver the largest digital and transformation projects in Government. There really couldn’t be a better time to join HMRC for your new contract opportunity!

HMRC’s Chief Digital Information Office delivers complex, high value products and platforms that support HMRC’s strategic goals and improve outcomes for millions of users.

This is an exciting opportunity to join HMRC’s CDIO (Chief Digital & Information Officer) Organisation Transformation team who are enabling the organisation to move towards a more agile and product led way of working across CDIO.

As CDIO moves towards a more product led way of working, we require a temporary product management coach to support our new product managers, lead product managers, and associate (junior) product managers to support the transition. The coach will work across the personal tax services portfolio to build and embed good agile practices around product led ways of working, including:

• Coaching the team to develop product visions and understand key service outcomes that the portfolio must support
• Building practical product management skills, such as road mapping, scoping iterations and features, stakeholder management and managing technical debt.
• Help to shape the cultural and behavioural foundations for excellent digital delivery, both with the team and senior leaders and stakeholders.
• Enabling teams to learn and adopt new practices, and ultimately be able to continue them forward in a self sufficient way.

You will be working with teams who are part of our ‘Quarterly alignment cadence’ pilots. These pilots are about helping teams to adopt good practices around setting visions, road mapping quarterly, tracking delivery and OKRs within product groups, and ultimately enabling delivery of IT services. Coaches work with teams for a time limited period, introducing new ways of working, building capability within teams, and ultimately enabling the team to self sufficiently run these processes themselves. A coach will work with at least one product group at a time, but may also be working with multiple groups at one time, depending on the scale and maturity of the team, and the amount of support needed.

You will work closely with senior stakeholders, Heads of Role, product managers and their teams product team, suppliers, and finally other coaches to drive continuous improvement, unblock systemic constraints, and support the evolution of delivery maturity across CDIO. You will also play a leading role in strengthening our Agile and delivery communities of practice, supporting professional development and capability uplift.

Key Responsibilities

As a product coach, you will:

Coach and mentor multidisciplinary teams in Product management supporting the product managers to define product visions, scope work, and plan increments in order of what is most valuable to do first.

Support product managers to develop capability across the various activities in the product lifecycle as needed- for example, from scoping, to prioritisation techniques, producing user stories and acceptance criteria to build the backlog, to setting the delivery cadence and tracking product success. This could be in collaboration with the existing profession community, making use of the internal guidance and training materials available and helping teams to start using them.

Coach and influence senior leaders, providing evidence based recommendations on delivery models, team structures and organisational improvements.

Support teams to work with senior stakeholders across HMRC to understand good practices around agile and product management, including working in sustainable and iterative ways, to take a lean approach to delivering value, and to help the product team build alignment around their roadmaps and product vision.

Champion a positive, inclusive and psychologically safe delivery culture, modelling desired behaviours and practices, such as empowering product teams and their autonomy, whilst building stakeholder trust in product team decisions.

Identify improvements to ways of working and help the team to implement these. This includes helping the team transition from a project led way of working, where requirements are understood and passed to a supplier as a project, to a more product led way of working where there is ongoing collaboration with stakeholders and suppliers to continuously improve the product and continuously deliver high quality and incremental changes.

Build technical product management capability in teams, including helping teams to understand how their current products work, and how to modernise products, manage complex migrations and to manage technical debt.

Build capability in teams to take on the rituals and run the cadence themselves after a period of coaching, in line with the coaching agreement.

Create a sustainable plan and roadmap for building the capability within teams, designing a plan on handover activities and targeted roles needed within teams to continue delivery in that area.

Person Specification

Essential Criteria:

The successful candidate will need to demonstrate practical knowledge and experience in the following:

• Expert-level experience of product management within large, complex digital organisations.
• Expert level experience of coaching product managers, including experience of working with multiple PMs at a time, and building self sufficiency in PMs.

• Extensive practical experience with Scrum, Kanban and Lean practices, applied across varied delivery contexts.

• Strong experience of technical product management, such as managing modernisation of legacy systems, or managing complex migrations while protecting a live service, or equivalent experiences.

• Proven ability to change ways of working and resolve systemic barriers, including demonstrating experience of helping teams and their stakeholders successfully adopt agile ways of working.
• Experience influencing and supporting senior stakeholders, providing clear, evidence based guidance.

• Excellent facilitation skills, creating inclusive, high engagement workshops and ceremonies.

• Strong understanding of modern software delivery, such as DevOps ways of working and user centred design principles.

  This is an exciting opportunity to join HMRC’s CDIO (Chief Digital & Information Officer) Organisation Transformation team who are enabling the organisation to move towards a more agile and product led way of working across CDIO.

• Expert level experience of coaching product managers, including experience of working with multiple PMs at a time, and building self sufficiency in PMs.
• Extensive practical experience with Scrum, Kanban and Lean practices, applied across varied delivery contexts.
• Strong experience of technical product management, such as managing modernisation of legacy systems, or managing complex migrations while protecting a live service, or equivalent experiences.
• Proven ability to change ways of working and resolve systemic barriers, including demonstrating experience of helping teams and their stakeholders successfully adopt agile ways of working.
• Experience influencing and supporting senior stakeholders, providing clear, evidence based guidance.
• Excellent facilitation skills, creating inclusive, high engagement workshops and ceremonies.
• Strong understanding of modern software delivery, such as DevOps ways of working and user centred design principles.

Our Values

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact your designated recruiter to request accommodation.