Senior Agile Delivery Manager

Who are we?👋

Look at the latest headlines and you will see something Ki insures. Think space shuttles, world tours, wind farms, and even footballers’ legs.

Ki’s mission is simple. Digitally disrupt and revolutionise a 335-year-old market. Working with Google and UCL, Ki has created a platform that uses algorithms, machine learning and large language models to give insurance brokers quotes in seconds, rather than days.

Ki is proudly the biggest global algorithmic insurance carrier. It is the fastest growing syndicate in the Lloyd's of London market, and the first ever to make $100m in profit in 3 years.

Ki’s teams have varied backgrounds and work together in an agile, cross-functional way to build the very best experience for its customers. Ki has big ambitions but needs more excellent minds to challenge the status-quo and help it reach new horizons.

Where you come in?

We are looking for an experienced Senior Agile Delivery Manager to join our team. You’ll be shaping the future of algorithmic underwriting - helping our squads to deliver amazing product capabilities and experiences for our users. You need to be experienced in agile frameworks and able to develop high-performing, cross-functional teams using a servant leadership approach, working across multiple teams.  

You will help our teams co-ordinate around challenging deadlines and releases, collaborating with different stakeholders from across our organisation. You’ll need to be comfortable spinning plates and dealing with complex problems but also have a coaching mindset, helping our teams to help themselves and improve how we get stuff done.

Our teams work using different agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban, to deliver new feature or enhancement to our partner brokers. This could be developments on our external API, a new experience in our broker platform for a new insurance product or an enhancement to our algorithm.

What you will be doing: 🖋️

• Translating product roadmaps and features into an achievable delivery plan, considering the people and skills required and predicting milestones based on forecasts where possible

• Managing delivery across multiple development squads, you will also be responsible for managing more complex cross team projects where required and setting up mechanisms to identify and resolve dependencies

• Take ownership of deliverables and initiatives to improve delivery across the organisation

• Delivering in line with the team’s capacity and availability, developing an understanding of the relevant frameworks to leverage supplier needs when necessary, and budgeting effectively for resourcing requirements

• Actively managing risks, issues, and dependencies for your delivery team, acting on delivery data and adapting ways of working to mitigate risks, taking corrective action where necessary to ensure delivery is as successful as possible

• Partnering with a Product Manager to develop communication approaches so you can effectively engage with and influence relevant stakeholders, translating technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

• Monitoring trends in team performance and effectiveness, and engaging and motivating the team as required

• Using feedback loops, data analysis, and small experiments to iteratively improve the product, service, and ways of working within the delivery team

• Work across disciplines to ensure that work flows effectively and that the benefits of products and services delivered are measured.

• Resolve conflict and disagreement, facilitate workshops, remove distractions and impediments, help them make decisions, whatever it takes to ensure they are able to operate effectively

• Clearly communicate vision, schedule and progress, both within and outside of the teams

• Facilitate workshops and ceremonies such as standups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, showcases and retrospectives

• Bring expertise in agile software development to Ki, both via good knowledge of the theory and experience of having applied it in a number of environments

Requirements:
• Relevant technical delivery management or technical project management experience successfully leading teams through the full product life cycle, and gained experience using a variety of tools and techniques to drive delivery

• Track record of success defining, planning and delivering innovative project workstreams and complex projects

• First class communication skills, with the ability to tailor your style to different audiences, both technical and non-technical

• Excellent organisation and time management skills, setting a continuous delivery rhythm for our teams

• The ability to define, coach and embed Agile and Lean best practices within the teams 

• Enthusiastic, proactive and able to resolve conflict - individuals and teams

• Able to steer a programme towards self-organisation

• Able to quickly understand business domains and assess genuine business value

• A clear, adaptive and transparent communicator

• Proactive and an accomplished influencer - ability to negotiate with other programmes and teams to deliver work packages to fixed deadlines.

• Able to manage and track work, dependencies, risks and issues across multiple streams and groups

• Experience creating and maintaining plans that highlight delivery forecasts, estimates and confidence levels

• Using experience of technology delivery and technical practices to help translate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

• Using people management skills to set individuals up for success and help create an effective team environment

• Using metrics and previous experience to identify, understand and improve delivery performance challenges

• Adapting approaches to different phases of the delivery lifecycle, from inception, to launch

• Managing budgets and commercial supplier relationships when necessary

• Have a solid understanding and experience of implementing various agile methodologies that are suitable to the work we are delivering, including Scrum and Kanban, passionate about agile ways of working

• Enjoy acting as a servant leader

• Experience in scaling teams, ideally having worked in a scale-up or growth business

• Experience of highly regulated environments and/or insurance would be ideal

• Experience or knowledge of project management frameworks would also be beneficial but not essential