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THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF ANAKHA 'S FRESH THINKING

Creativity isn’t something that only senior managers do. In Digital and Innovation at Westminster City Council, we expect it from everyone, including our newest recruits.

Enter Anakha, a graduate trainee, full of energy and fresh ideas. We welcomed her input to our Smart City initiatives, especially our Innovation Hub - a newly created space where staff, residents and businesses can meet, experiment and exchange ideas.

But it was what happened next that really made a difference. Anakha’s innovation space project was used to invite young people to help them find work through the Kickstart programme as well as to recruit young people to our Tech Lions initiative, and is regularly occupied by the Apprentice community.

We’re also inviting residents aged 11-19 from the Westminster Youth Council to the Hub to attend a fun ‘speed dating’ event, where they hear from different digital teams. We’ll continue to meet with them every week to keep them directly involved in our plans to ensure young people have a regular voice at the heart of the council. From the importance of electric vehicle charging points to new uses for tech, their insights about the kind of city they want to live in are central to our plans.

As for Anakha, she’s now moved into a permanent Project Manager role in the Digital and Innovation Smart City team. Supported by ongoing mentoring from colleagues, she’s already developing even bigger and better ideas.

The Role:

As a Senior Product Manager, you can make your own powerful contribution by working on one of our flagship products ‘Report It’. This innovative product combines cutting-edge technology with AI to enable our local residents, businesses and visitors to report street-based issues. For example, reporting fly-tipping, graffiti, highways issues or even noise complaints in a quick, discreet and intuitive way. And with you in our team, we’ll be able to go even further in our work.

Taking on the responsibility to grow this product (with an investment of £1.5million to £2million), you will work with our skilled team of experts to assess multi-layered challenges and define a clear strategy on how we’re going to solve these. Utilising a broad range of user-insights and stakeholder priorities to determine outcome-focused roadmaps and the design of prototypes, you will underpin your decisions with qualitative and quantitative data. With ultimate responsibility for defining the nuances of each feature and procuring third-party technologies, you will consider technical capabilities when defining achievable and cost-effective goals. Crucially, you will work with stakeholders every step of the way to ensure they understand and are on-board with your proposals.

We are always looking for better ways of working, and as such, this is an exciting time to join us. We will encourage you to upskill your colleagues and make suggestions on how we can scale our products across the organisation. Reporting on the performance of your product, you will be keen to ensure we are meeting and ideally exceeding our goals, and you will be ready to prioritise and tackle product backlogs. Furthermore, we will look to you to educate senior business stakeholders on the importance of user-centred design. So, there is immense scope to have a significant impact across departments - and in doing so, you will make a tangible impact on the wellbeing of our local communities.

We reserve the right to extend or close this vacancy early without warning subject to the volume of suitable applicants, so please do apply as soon as possible if you would like to embark on a deeply fulfilling career in our team.

Please refer to the Job Description for more information.

About You:

We expect you to have significant product management experience, with a background in leading multidisciplinary teams to design and build digital products and services. You will have the opportunity to work with everyone from User Researchers and Service Designers to Delivery Managers, Software Developers and more - you will be not only collaborating but inspiring everyone towards the product vision. Encouraging the team to embrace agile methodologies and user-centred design principles, you will be adept at scaling products and designing prototypes and MVPs.

Your ability to guide organizational leadership towards making the right product decisions, using data-driven and evidence-driven thinking, will be crucial. You will be building strong relationships with business stakeholders to effectively collaborate on product decisions. You will also have the responsibility for line managing Product Managers and/or Product Analysts. As such, you will be an inspirational leader who is committed to helping colleagues develop their skills.

With a good knowledge of issues impacting local government and the relevance of GDPR in product delivery, it would be useful if you are well-versed in cross-government Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) capability framework and Government Digital Services (GDS) standards.

On top of your extensive skills and experience, you will share our determination to use technology for good, and you will have the resilience to overcome operational constraints without ever compromising on your high standards. A can-do attitude and great communication and influencing skills will take you a long way in our team!

Westminster City Council is committed to supporting Care Leavers into the workplace. Care Leavers seeking their first job and who wish to be considered under our scheme, will automatically be invited to interview should they meet the essential criteria for the role.

The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a Global Majority (GM), people who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’ (formally known as B.A.M.E, Black, Asian and multiple ethnic) background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments.

What We Offer:

Westminster is an amazing place. We are home to more than 200,000 residents from all backgrounds, over 50,000 vibrant and vital businesses and three-quarters-of-a-million people work in Westminster.

Westminster City Council’s strategy is to work towards a Fairer Westminster. A Fairer Westminster is one in which our communities are at the heart of our decision-making and help to determine the city’s future. By working directly with our communities and other partners, we can build a more inclusive city that celebrates our diverse communities, and where residents, workers and visitors from all backgrounds will feel welcome and safe.

As a forward thinking Council we appreciate that people work in different ways, therefore our staff benefit from working a range of flexible working patterns as well as Agile working.