Head of Product (Platform, GenAI)

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Sector: Media and Publishing
Role: Senior Manager
Contract Type: Permanent
Hours: Full Time

Job Introduction
The BBC's Product Management function is looking to appoint a Head of Product - Platform, GenAI to play a key role in the growth of the BBC's digital products and a best-in-class product culture. This is a highly strategic, Individual Contributor (IC) role, focused on defining, operating and ensuring value from the integration and development of scaled GenAI capabilities across our platform.

Main Responsibilities

• Leading the product strategy, roadmap prioritisation and development of GenAI platforms at scale for our digital products.
• Working closely with Product colleagues in our Platform, Experiences and Go-To-Market (GTM) pillars to ensure a joined-up and consistent approach to scaling GenAI solutions.
• Collaborating with GenAI stakeholders across the business including R&D, Editorial, Nations, Marketing and other peers to ensure the delivery of the BBC's strategic objectives, while also crafting a culture of excellence.
• Defining, developing and communicating how GenAI can unlock new opportunities at scale, particularly within a 'horizontal' Platform setting.
• Influencing product roadmaps by defining the strategy for scaling GenAI and related technologies, balancing technical innovation, business priorities, and operational excellence.
• Partnering with pan-BBC GenAI teams and pilot programmes, understanding how to scale to support multiple use cases on a shared platform.
• Collaborating closely with Engineering, Data, Experimentation, Platform, Experience and GTM Product peers, and stakeholders from the wider organisation, to ensure alignment and progress against organisational goals and priorities.
• Championing BBC Responsible AI best practices internally and externally to influence industry best practices and policies for responsible use of AI, working closely with the Responsible AI team.
• Working closely with Engineering colleagues to ensure the platform architecture supports scalability, high availability, and low latency, while proactively identifying and mitigating risks which might compromise organisational objectives.

Leadership

• Contributing to the Product Management leadership team and leadership community across Product Group: influencing and upskilling teams in identifying and exploring opportunities for GenAI.
• Defining, modelling and refining high-quality Product craft at all stages of the Product Development Lifecycle, with an emphasis on data-informed decision making, outcome-focus, experimentation and continuous discovery.

Platform and Technical

• Ensuring the effective delivery of shared platform services that empower Experience, Platform and GTM teams to focus on delivering user-facing value.
• Staying ahead of industry trends in GenAI/ML, data products, and other platform-related technologies to drive the user experience forward.
• Introducing tools and frameworks that enhance the organisation's ability to leverage GenAI at scale. Defining evaluation approaches and success measures for experiments, platform performance and user-facing applications.
• Ensuring platform services meet the highest security and compliance standards in partnership with legal and compliance teams.

Are You the Right Candidate?

• Significant & demonstrable experience in Product Management for Data and Platform products.
• Proven experience with bringing GenAI products to market at scale.
• Significant experience in Product leadership roles - including defining product strategy and roadmaps, determining metrics and targets, and successfully executing at all stages of the Product Development Lifecycle.
• Skilled at balancing user needs, technical feasibility and organisational dynamics, to effectively prioritise and manage trade-offs between short-term needs and long-term investments.
• Experience influencing without direct authority in matrixed or cross-functional organisations.
• Track record of delivering complex, scalable, reliable, and reusable systems on time and within budget.
• Successful collaboration with engineering, data, design and product teams to deliver shared platform capabilities.
• Strong technical acumen, with a solid understanding of APIs, cloud platforms, and data infrastructure.
• Analytical mindset with experience in defining and tracking platform-related performance metrics and user-facing experiments.
• Experience of writing and evaluating product specifications, proposals and reports for initiatives and experiments at a range of scales.
• Experience of managing multi-disciplinary teams within an agile environment and an in-depth knowledge of agile delivery principles, quality software engineering processes and practices.
• Ability to plan and forecast product budget and deliver within that budget.

Characteristics

• A systems thinker: excelling at understanding and optimising complex systems with interdependent components.
• User-focused: challenging assumptions through research, mitigating risks through testing, and shaping strategy with a deep understanding of current and target users.
• A strong collaborator: working effectively with stakeholders and peers at all levels.
• Detail-oriented: meticulous about designing and delivering robust, secure, and scalable solutions.
• A visionary: capable of anticipating future needs and building a platform strategy that supports long-term growth.

Package Description
Band: F
Contract type: 1 x continuing (permanent) role
Location: Flexible/Hybrid
Salary: up to £150,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience.

About the BBC
We're happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression - the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities - our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits - we offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.

We don't focus simply on what we do - we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you've read about our values and behaviours in the below document: Our BBC Values.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC - whether that's to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please visit Diversity and Inclusion.