Duration: Contract 6 Months

Location: Hybrid - Surrey or Warwick (3 days circa / 2 days remote)

• Program Manager to join our highly skilled and dynamic Lifestyle Products team. This pivotal role will operate in a hybrid capacity out of one of our offices near Guildford or Coventry, where the successful candidate will have the opportunity to work alongside some of the most visionary minds in the automotive field.
• This is a rare and exciting opportunity to become part of a scale-up, where your contributions will play a crucial role in shaping the future of our forward-thinking company. With its rapid growth trajectory and dynamic nature, The client offers you an exceptional platform to help drive strategy as we expand into new horizons.
• Lifestyle Products is an umbrella term to cover a number of exciting area's including bespoke & customisation, stand-alone and vehicle integrated accessorise (& certain options), as well as providing vehicle design engineering support on holistic topics such as storage.

What you will do:

• This is a high level program management role, ensuring that the department is running optimally as a whole, rather than the day to day program management of specific products, which will be completed by the Project Engineers.
• This will involve setting up and refining processes, particularly around a product development framework, including how we maintain and store revision controlled documentation. This extends to how we manage inputs from partner departments, ensuring it's clear what is required and when.
• The individual would run regular program management reviews with the Project Engineers to ensure all the departments projects are running on time, to budget and meeting the relevant requirements. In addition, recognising any recurrent progress blockers across projects and seeking to eliminate or mitigate them.
• Department level spending will need to be tracked with the help of Finance, ensuring we stay within our budgetary constraints. Department level progress reports will also be regularly collated (including setting up tools to collect the data) and reported out to senior management.
• Finally you'll analyse the total workload of the department, smoothing projects if required to ensure there are no bottlenecks.

Experience Required:

• You will be a strong communicator, with influencing skills to build relationships with a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders.
• Be willing to ask tough questions when required, and hold people to account.
• Good experience within engineering & program management is essential.
• A background in vehicle and product engineering is highly desirable.
• A good understanding of project management methodology.
• Be highly analytical with good attention to detail.
• Enjoy creating and refining processes.
• An ability to regularly zoom out and see the big picture.