All Locations
Home based
Advertising Salary
Competitive + benefits
Vacancy type
Permanent

About the role

We are seeking an experienced Head of Product Operations to design, build, and run the operating model that powers Zellis’s product organisation. This role ensures the product function is predictable, transparent, compliant, and commercially effective—from strategy and planning through delivery and go-to-market readiness. Acting as the voice of operational excellence, you will establish the frameworks, cadences, metrics, and tooling that help product, engineering, and design teams execute consistently at scale. The Head of Product Operations will report into the CPO, and work cross-functionally to align portfolio plans, standardise ways of working, improve signal-to-noise in decision making, and remove delivery / GTM friction. You will drive measurable improvements in throughput, quality, and stakeholder confidence while enabling clear communication to senior leadership.
 
Key Responsibilities
 
Product Operating Model & Governance
• Define and continuously improve the product operating model (planning horizons, cadences, ceremonies, artefacts, and decision rights)
• Establish governance forums (e.g., portfolio councils, release readiness reviews) and ensure clear RACI across product, engineering, design, compliance, and commercial stakeholders
• Create templates and standards for product artefacts (business cases, PRDs, roadmaps, acceptance criteria) to raise consistency and quality
 
Portfolio Planning & Roadmap Orchestration
• Lead annual and quarterly portfolio planning; align strategic bets with capacity, dependencies, and risk. Integrate market, customer, and compliance inputs into prioritisation frameworks; ensure traceability from strategy to backlog
• Maintain transparent roadmaps and change-control processes that balance global and in-market needs.
 
Delivery Excellence & Lifecycle Management
• Define stage gates from discovery to launch; codify “definition of ready” and “definition of done.” Run cross-functional release management and feature readiness checks (enablement collateral, support SLAs, monitoring plans)
• Identify bottlenecks; implement continuous-improvement initiatives (lead-time reduction, defect prevention, incident post-mortems)
 
Data, Metrics & Insights
• Own product performance metrics and operational dashboards (OKRs, adoption, NPS/CSAT, cycle-time, forecast accuracy)
• Standardise how teams measure impact and communicate progress; drive data-driven decisions and investment trade-offs
 
Go-to-Market Readiness & Enablement
  • Coordinate launch readiness across Product, Product Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Implementation and Support.
• Ensure positioning, messaging, demos, pricing inputs, and playbooks are in place before each release.
• Create feedback loops from sales and customers to inform post-launch iteration.
 
Compliance, Risk & Auditability
• Work with Compliance, Legal, and Security to operationalise controls in the product lifecycle
• Maintain evidence and documentation for internal/external audits; ensure change management and approvals are traceable.
 
People, Capability & Communities of Practice
• Build a central Product Operations team and mentor product managers in operational excellence.
• Run communities of practice for discovery, experimentation, and delivery; provide training on frameworks and tools.
 
Stakeholder Leadership
• Maintain strong communication loops with leadership, product peers, and cross-functional groups.
• Present portfolio health, delivery progress, and operational improvements to senior stakeholders.
• Develop relationships with customers, partners, and domain experts to keep operational priorities grounded in real-world needs.

Skills & experience

Core Expectations of a Head of Product Operations
• Operates with high autonomy and strategic clarity across multiple teams and time horizons.
• Balances customer impact, commercial outcomes, and operational feasibility.
• Makes clear, data-driven decisions; influences without authority and drives alignment.
• Simplifies complex programmes into actionable plans; continuously improves processes.
• Acts as a thought leader for operational excellence and delivery predictability.
 
Highly Desired Skills
• Proven leadership in Product Operations or Programme Delivery within SaaS at scale.
• Experience implementing portfolio governance, planning cadences, and operating models across multi-disciplinary teams.
• Strong familiarity with compliance-heavy domains (e.g., payroll/HR/finance/regulatory software).
• Ability to create enablement materials and readiness checklists for launches.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management; comfortable presenting to senior executives.
• Change-management capability to embed new ways of working across teams.
 
Experience
• 10–12+ years in product operations, programme management, or product management, ideally in enterprise SaaS.
• Track record of improving delivery metrics (cycle-time, forecast accuracy, quality) and launch readiness at scale.
• Experience partnering with Engineering, Design, Product Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Compliance, and Finance.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to standardise and simplify complexity for diverse audiences.
• Customer-centric mindset with commercial acumen and fluency in portfolio economics

Benefits & culture

At Zellis we create market-leading HR & Payroll products and services, to power exceptional employee experiences so that you and your people do better. Our multi-award-winning products pay over five million employees a year, with almost half (42%) of the FTSE 100, 50% of the top retailers and 30% of the top universities in the UK & Ireland as customers, making us the largest provider of Payroll and HR software and managed services.

Our vision is to be the clear leader in pay, reward, analytics, and people experiences. We're passionate about creating an environment where people want to join, belong to, and be part of a progressive organisation. Our values, which were defined with input from all of our 2,000 colleagues, we live and breathe every day:

  • Unstoppable together.
  • Always learning.
  • Make it count.
  • Think scale.

Our people are critical to our ongoing success; we’re proud of our inclusive culture that gives you the platform to grow, challenge the status quo and play a crucial role in further enhancing our market position as the leading provider of HR & Payroll software and services. With Zellis you’ll have the chance to stretch and challenge yourself in an environment that’s varied, flexible and hugely supportive.

We also love to reward and recognise our brilliant colleagues. As part of your benefits package, you’ll receive:

  • A competitive base salary, plus cash car allowance and commission.
  • 25 days annual leave, plus your birthday off and the opportunity to buy additional holiday.
  • Private medical insurance.
  • Life assurance 4x salary.
  • Enhanced pension scheme with company contributions up to 8.5%.
  • A huge range of additional flexible benefits across financial & personal wellbeing, lifestyle & leisure.

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