Programme Manager B2C

Who we are

Since 1843, The Economist Group has championed independence, excellence and openness, helping people understand and tackle the critical challenges shaping the world. Today, we are building on that legacy as a global media and information-services company powered by digital innovation, analytical rigour and evidence-based insight.

Across our three businesses - The Economist, Economist Enterprise and Economist Education - we deliver trusted analysis and insights to individuals and organisations in more than 170 countries. United by a shared purpose to drive progress, we empower decision-makers to make sense of change and chart a course through an increasingly complex world.

As a colleague, you will be part of a culture that values ideas, encourages ownership and holds itself to high standards. We invest in people who are curious, thoughtful and adaptable, whether they are launching new products, reporting on global events or harnessing emerging technologies such as AI to improve how we work. Here, fresh thinking is taken seriously, ambition is matched by integrity, and great work is recognised. Working across disciplines, geographies and perspectives, we are united by a commitment to innovation, excellence and creating meaningful impact.

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The Economist’s B2C business is how most readers meet us: written content, podcasts, narrated articles, video, all on and off-platform. Building premium experiences for The Economist’s premium offering is what excites us. Changing any of that means moving product, engineering, marketing, editorial and commercial at the same time - which makes these the largest and most visible programmes The Economist B2C business runs.

The role

We are hiring a Programme Manager to own these programmes end to end. This is not a coordination role: you will hold the plan, chair the governance, hunt the dependencies before they bite, and tell senior people the truth early when something slips.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end delivery of B2C’s most important programmes, across product, engineering, marketing and editorial. This is not a coordination role: you are accountable for ensuring what’s required to deliver business value ships on time, on budget and within scope. You will work with a single accountable Business Sponsor, Engineering Lead and Product Lead (or combination of these) for every programme.
• Get deep enough into the business case, the technical solution and the contributing teams to lead the programme directly rather than report on it.
• Break the programme into named workstreams with named owners, and hold the integrated plan, critical path and dependency map across them.
• Hunt dependencies before they bite, scheduling fragile work such as end-to-end testing, migrations and design review with realistic lead time.
• Maintain a single source of truth per workstream: programme decisions, risks, and a plan people trust more than their own notes.
• Commit only what is understood. Dates and scope do not go to stakeholders while the uncertainty behind them is still open. A date offered to relieve pressure in the room is a date that will be wrong in reality.
• Chair the programme’s governance (Team of Teams, Business Design Authority, stakeholder syncs and Go/No Go) and own the flash report, the decision log and the escalation path.
• Communicate openly and early, including where there is bad news, setting out impact, cause and the proposed response.
• Make operational readiness part of done, ensuring support teams have runbooks and understand expected behaviour before launch.
• Resolve cross-pillar resourcing and sequencing conflicts, and hold third parties to the same standard as your own teams.
• Put in place the means to track benefit realisation after launch, and close the programme with a retrospective that produces preventive actions.

Who you are

• Experience leading large, multi-team programmes to a public launch date, where product, engineering, marketing and commercial had to deliver together, rather than workstreams or projects inside a single squad.
• Technically literate: able to follow an architecture discussion, test an estimate and ask informed questions of engineering teams.
• Commercial judgement: comfortable partneri…