Director, Solutions Design and Development, Product, UK

About the Role

The Product Manager is the most senior PM role in the Development team and shapes and drives the strategic direction of products, platforms, and capabilities across WPP Media Solutions. The role works across business, technology, data, and operations to ensure priorities are understood, delivery is aligned to business objectives, and strategic initiatives can be executed effectively at scale. The Product Manager is accountable for product direction, stakeholder alignment, roadmap management, and supporting a connected, scalable, product-led delivery model.

The Product Manager is the direct manager and functional lead for Product Owners, supporting their development, alignment, delivery effectiveness, and adoption of consistent product and agile practices. The role provides regular updates on roadmap progress, risks, dependencies, and strategic opportunities.

What You'll Do

Strategy and roadmap leadership

• Define and maintain product roadmaps aligned to business priorities, client outcomes, operational requirements, and strategic growth opportunities
• Translate leadership objectives into structured product initiatives and delivery plans
• Balance short-term commercial priorities with long-term platform maturity, scalability, maintainability, and sustainability
• Ensure alignment with wider WPP and Choreograph data, technology, and platform strategies

Commercial and client value alignment

• Partner with Solutions Design as well as Commercial, Activation, Planning, and Client Leadership teams to support scalable client growth and measurable business value
• Shape solutions that balance client ambition, operational practicality, commercial sustainability, and delivery feasibility
• Improve operational efficiency, transparency, automation, and client outcomes through product and platform evolution

Cross-functional leadership

• Lead through influence across multiple teams and disciplines without direct ownership of delivery functions
• Align business, operational, and technical teams around shared objectives and delivery momentum
• Facilitate decisions across complex stakeholder groups with competing priorities, timelines, and pressures
• Act as the strategic escalation point for delivery, prioritisation, dependencies, and stakeholder management

Product Owner leadership and team development

• Provide leadership, guidance, and line management to Product Owners
• Ensure Product Owners align to strategic priorities, roadmap objectives, governance standards, and delivery expectations
• Champion agile and product-led working practices, including consistent documentation, definition-of-ready/definition-of-done, and backlog discipline across the team
• Support Product Owner development, capability growth, and career progression through objective-setting and regular 1:1s

Delivery and engineering liaison

• Act as the primary interface between the Product Management function and the Engineering Lead/Solutions Architect, ensuring requirements are engineering-ready before entering delivery
• Own the development cycle cadence in partnership with the Scrum Master (sprint/release planning, backlog grooming, capacity planning)
• Own overall user acceptance testing (UAT) governance across the team - standards, sign-off criteria, and escalation of failed UAT cycles

What You'll Bring

Skills & Experience

• Proven track record leading a product management function for at least 8 years within a technical/engineering environment, ideally in adtech, martech, or data-driven media
• Experience managing a team of Product Owners or Product Managers, including performance management and development planning
• Strong command of agile delivery frameworks (Scrum/Kanban) and the mechanics of sprint/release planning
• Ability to operate at both the strategic (roadmap, commercial alignment, stakeholder leadership) and tactical (requirements, UAT, backlog) level
• Excellent stakeholder management — able to lead through influence across teams with no direct delivery ownership
• Experience working with data infrastructure, reporting, automation/AI, or platform integration products is a strong advantage
• Proven experience working in a highly matrixed global to local organisation and comfortable managing external dependencies for deliverables.

Success Measures

• Roadmap delivery against committed timelines across all product verticals
• Consistency and maturity of Product Owner practice (backlog quality, UAT pass rates, requirements traceability)
• Product Owner team retention, capability growth, and succession depth
• Stakeholder satisfaction (Design, Engineering, business) with requirements quality and delivery predictability
• Oversee and own the ways of working for the solutions product owners to deliver the bigger picture.

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