Head of Product
Job summary
The Personalised Prevention Services (PPS) portfolio brings together digital tools and services that help people take better care of their health, make informed choices, and get the right support earlier. Teams in PPS are building simple, joined-up services that help people:
- understand their health risks
- find the right support
- take action in a way that fits into their lives
Main duties of the job
- Deliver the vision and make it real: working with the PPS Senior Leadership Team (SLT), deliver on the vision for personalised prevention. Helping people, especially those who most need it, find support, stick with healthier habits, and get the right help earlier. This includes ensuring the quality of all associated artefacts such as the product roadmap, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
- Take ownership of the Product Profession: Lead a strong community of practice for product managers in PPS
- Build brilliant products: Lead the product direction for developing services that are "too good not to use" for both patients and healthcare staff, aligned to the NHS Service Standard
- Lead and grow brilliant teams: working closely with the Head of Delivery and PPS SLT, build strong multidisciplinary, rainbow teams, comprising colleagues from your own organisation, partners and suppliers, creating an environment where people can do their best work
- Join things up: work closely with clinicians, policy teams, ICBs and partners to create services that fit into real world pathways and local systems, fostering a culture of openness and collaboration
- Use data to improve lives: use insight and evidence to understand what works, improve services and target support where it's needed
- Shape the future of prevention: Stay curious, test new ideas, and lead innovation in areas like digital health assessments, personalised support, and behaviour change
About us
NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers. These are focused on supporting the wider NHS to deliver high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS.
Our staff bring expertise across clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial specialisms -- enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.
In March 2025, the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the department.
If you currently work within the NHS and if successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR).This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the process.
Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.
Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band.
We cannot offer visa sponsorship for any vacancies.
Job description
Job responsibilities
- Accountable for the success and impact of products across the Personalised Prevention Services (PPS) portfolio, working across the digital service lifecycle (Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and large-scale live services)
- Information Asset Owner (IAO) responsibility for PPS digital products. This requires senior decision making on data governance, security, and risk management, ensuring that patient and population data is handled safely and in line with NHS England standards.
- Deputise for the Head of Delivery managing the budget for PPS.
- Accountable for leading a strong community of practice for product managers, ensuring effective coaching, support, and shared learning to grow the capability and create a culture of continuous improvement across the organisation.
- Responsible for increasing uptake of prevention services and improving health outcomes at scale
- Ensure services improve access and help reduce health inequalities
- Accountable for delivering value for money and improving productivity across the system
- Own delivery against agreed outcomes, timelines and budgets
- Ensure services are safe, secure, accessible and trusted
- Act as a senior leader within NHS England, influencing direction and decisions
- Build strong relationships with senior stakeholders across the NHS, DHSC and beyond
- Help teams navigate ambiguity, where a test and learn approach is needed to find a good solution to achieve a defined outcome
- Create a culture where teams feel supported and empowered, where they can do their best work and make a real difference
You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, alongside the organisational structure and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.
Person Specification
Knowledge
- Significant experience in user-centred service design practices and methodologies for both public facing and internal services and applications
- Experience of leading user-centred, agile programmes the wider private / public / third sector digital landscape
- Experience of public sector procurement and contracting frameworks or supplier management
Skills
- Exceptional communicator and acts as an ambassador for the organisation to deliver key messages with senior stakeholders
- Demonstrates exceptional written communication skills - able to write clear delivery reports, briefings, option/decision papers and presentations under time pressure
- Experience working within the NHS or in other health- and/or care-related organisations
- Connect our service - understand how health and social care services fit together and how different people, teams or organisations interconnect and interact
- Proven experience working collaboratively and productively with colleagues with diverse experience at all levels to achieve results
- Extensive experience leading teams applying agile methodologies and principles (e.g. Scrum, Kanban etc.) to deliver desired outcomes successfully
- Proven experience of sharing the future vision and strategy of the organisation - making it tangible and real and promoting it to others internally and externally
- Extensive experience in making sound judgements and taking critical decisions throughout the lifecycle of the programme when faced with uncertainty, ambiguity and incomplete information
- Expert ability to manage complex relationships and gain/negotiate successful outcomes with key stakeholders where expert opinions may differ
- Extensive experience in commissioning work from internal and/or external suppliers and managing alignment, timescales and dependencies between own and supplier teams
- Experience of working with internal and external governance and standard-setting bodies (e.g. programme governance, GDS, CQC) within the public sector
Qualifications
- Membership of relevant societies, professional groups or communities of practice
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
Employer details
Employer name
NHS England
Address
This role can be based in London (10 South Colonnade) or Leeds (Wellington Place)
London or Leeds
E14 4PU
United Kingdom
Employer's website
https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/working-for/