Product Innovation Lead

Role Description

The Product Innovation Lead helps turn early, messy ideas into clear opportunities worth investing in. You lead incubators end to end — framing the right problems, designing learning‑led experiments, and helping teams move forward with confidence and pace.

This role blends user‑centred design, product thinking, facilitation, and experimentation. You guide cross‑functional teams through ambiguity, generate insight quickly, and turn learning into clear recommendations and next steps.

What you’ll do

• Bring clarity to complexity
  • Turn broad, ambiguous challenges into focused problems and learning goals.
  • Surface assumptions, identify unknowns, and define what really needs to be learned.
• Lead incubators end to end
  • Design and run time‑boxed incubators with clear purpose, flow, and outcomes.
  • Ensure fast learning, useful insight, and tangible outputs.
• Design for learning, not perfection
  • Create proportionate experiments, tests, and discovery activities.
  • Make ideas tangible through concepts, artefacts, or lightweight prototypes — at the right fidelity for the stage.
• Facilitate progress
  • Design and lead workshops and working sessions that align teams and unlock decisions.
  • Help groups think clearly, challenge thinking, and move forward together.
• Think in systems
  • Balance user needs, business goals, technical feasibility, and operational reality.
  • Understand how ideas connect across products, experiences, and the wider organisation.
• Build capability
  • Improve how innovation is done by shaping shared tools, methods, and ways of working.
  • Contribute to strong research and design culture of learning, critique, and collaboration.

Who you’ll work with

• Product Managers
• Learning Designers
• Researchers
• Interaction Designers
• Engineers
• Innovation Manager & Senior Innovation Researcher
• Wider Product Learning & Innovation partners

What success looks like

• You move teams from uncertainty to clarity and action.
• Incubators you lead produce learning that actually changes decisions.
• Experiments reduce risk and unlock progress quickly.
• Early ideas become clear, tangible, and testable.
• You handle ambiguous, cross‑functional work with confidence and autonomy.
• You improve shared practice — not just your own projects.

Qualifications

• Product, innovation, or design roles focused on early‑stage work.
• A track record of moving teams from vague challenges to clear next steps.
• Strong facilitation and workshop design experience.
• Hands‑on experience working with research, product, design, and engineering.
• A portfolio showing early concepts, artefacts, or prototypes — and good judgement about fidelity.
• Curiosity about better tools, methods, and ways of working.

Requirements

• Sound judgement in ambiguity
• Strategic, conceptual thinking
• Strong facilitation and group leadership
• Applied discovery and experimentation
• Clear design communication
• Systems thinking
• Cross‑functional influence
• Practical, delivery‑focused mindset

Benefits

• 35 days holidays
• Discretionary Annual Bonus
• Private Medical Insurance/BUPA Menopause Plan
• Income Protection
• Pension Plan
• Health Cash Plan
• Life Assurance
• Electric Car Scheme
• Gym-flex
• Employee Giving
• My Advantage – Employee Discounts
• Critical Illness cover
• Employee Assistance Program
• Holiday purchase option
• Flexible working