Portfolio Development Manager

Why this job matters

Are you ready to lead and inspire multifunctional teams across BT's lines of business and partners? As a Portfolio Development Manager (PDM), you will play a crucial role in developing and launching profitable products as part of the BT Portfolio Strategy. Your efforts will contribute to creating the most commercially successful portfolio of networked IT services, driving BT Business towards market leadership, revenue and profit growth, cost reduction, and enhanced customer experience.

In this role, you will:

• Project Manage the development and launch of new portfolio initiatives using the BT operating model and launch processes, across all phases.
• Understand Portfolio Development organisations and BT Business requirements, ensuring alignment with investment proposals and portfolio development plans for the financial year.
• Contribute to Roadmaps by working with Capability Leads and cross-functional teams to create portfolio development roadmaps, including initial high-level assessments of timescales and costs.
• Deliver Excellence by ensuring portfolio developments and launches meet time, cost, and quality goals, objectives, and KPIs.
• Achieve Business Benefits by contributing to revenue, profitability, cost-saving, and customer experience improvements as per approved business cases and Post Investment Reviews.
• Lead and Inspire a multifunctional virtual team, setting direction and motivating the team to achieve better, faster, and cheaper portfolio development, driving competitiveness and growth while putting the customer first. This includes reflecting market unit and capability unit priorities into team direction.

Join us and be a part of a dynamic team that is shaping the future of BT Business. Your leadership and expertise will be instrumental in driving our success and delivering exceptional value to our customers.

What you’ll be doing

• Be the Pivot: You'll act as the crucial link between the Product Manager and the teams across BT, empowering the Product Manager to focus on the "What" while you lead all the development teams on the "How" of building better products for our business.

• Change Leadership: Provide overarching change leadership against roadmap planning to ensure early optimisation of value through incremental feature builds, driving early customer and user feedback to inform and confirm desirability, feasibility, and viability.

• Agile Planning and Delivery: Plan and deliver portfolio developments through agile methodologies and customer-centric mindsets, with some waterfall delivery, driving solutions that put the customer at the heart of every decision.

• Stakeholder Relationships: Build relationships across a broad range of stakeholders and develop collaborative programme delivery plans to take new concepts through to in-life, while managing associated risks, issues, dependencies, assumptions, and constraints.

• Leadership and Management: Provide overarching change leadership and stakeholder management across multifunctional virtual teams from multiple areas and disciplines within the Portfolio and Development community to ensure the roadmap proposition development succeeds and delivers business case value.

• Continuous Improvement: Focus on continuous improvement of virtual team performance and stakeholder satisfaction, driving competitiveness and growth while putting the customer first.

• Inspire and Motivate: Lead, manage, and inspire the multifunctional virtual team, setting direction and motivating the team.

• Technical Leadership: Demonstrate technical competency to gain the trust of the development teams, lead on tough decisions that require risky changes, prioritise bugs, and negotiate "technical debt."

• Contribute to Improvement: Be a recognised contributor to the continuous improvement of portfolio development practices, creating the most value for portfolio goals such as speed, customer feedback, and revenue generation.

The skills you'll need

• Strategic Business Acumen: Understand business strategy, organisational performance drivers, and financial literacy. Be strategic and independent in your thinking.

• Agile Delivery: Experience in Agile project management with knowledge of methodologies like SAFe, Lean, Scrum, and Kanban. An industry-recognised qualification is a plus.

• Change Management: Build the case for change, share vision, and help others shape their change journey using data and analytical techniques.

• Problem Solving: Collaborate to find creative solutions, handle abstract concepts, ambiguity, and complexity.

• Engagement: Persuade and influence senior stakeholders, navigate conflict, and manage complex scenarios.

• Outcome Management: Ensure desired outcomes, benefits, and margins are identified, managed, and delivered.

• Analysis: Apply logical thinking to gather and analyse information, test hypotheses, and design solutions. Interpret and articulate data for successful delivery.

• Service Management: Understand IT Service Management fundamentals, ideally with a qualification like ITIL.

• Experience: Deliver complex engagements, manage the full delivery lifecycle, and develop strong relationships with stakeholders, partners, and suppliers.

• Technical Knowledge: Have a foundational understanding of relevant technology in the portfolio area you lead.

Benefits

• An annual on-target bonus of 10% (personal and company multipliers)
• BT Pension scheme: minimum 5% employee contribution, BT contribution 10%
• Exclusive colleague discounts on our latest and greatest BT broadband packages
• 50% off EE mobile pay monthly or SIM only plans, and 50% discount for friends and family on EE SIM only plans
• Discounted EE TV, including TNT Sport and the NOW Entertainment membership
• There’s also great support for working parents, including pay whilst on maternity, adoptive, and paternity leave
• 25 days annual leave (not including bank holidays), increasing with service
• Volunteering days, so you can give back to your local community
• Brand new electric vehicle salary sacrifice arrangement, known as ‘My EV’

Our leadership standards

Looking in:
Leading inclusively and Safely
I inspire and build trust through self-awareness, honesty and integrity.
Owning outcomes
I take the right decisions that benefit the broader organisation.

Looking out:
Delivering for the customer
I execute brilliantly on clear priorities that add value to our customers and the wider business.
Commercially savvy
I demonstrate strong commercial focus, bringing an external perspective to decision-making.

Looking to the future:
Growth mindset
I experiment and identify opportunities for growth for both myself and the organisation.
Building for the future
I build diverse future-ready teams where all individuals can be at their best.