Intro
If you are an amazing delivery centric project manager, want to do great things with a fast growing SaaS company, get well compensated and work at an amazing company with amazing people, then keep reading!
Background
In 2015 Slicedbread launched an innovative technology application called Sharedo. Described as a work and case management product, the platform helps organisations define, execute, and manage work such as legal cases, exploration, project development, property management, help desk, ticketing systems and much more.
Since its introduction, we have successfully delivered Sharedo across many verticals – FTSE100 energy companies, media and telecoms companies, and most significantly we have enjoyed considerable success in the legal market, having now deployed sharedo into a number of the UK’s largest law firms.
In September 2018, we closed a round of series-A funding led by Sussex Place Ventures, the venture capital arm of the London Business School. Although the company has always been a profitable, self-funding company, this investment enabled us to accelerate our vision to make sharedo the de-facto work planning and management platform.
As a result, having maintained positive growth, and as we continue to grow rapidly, we are looking to expand our talented and experienced professional service teams.
The people
Everyone says this, but the people at Sharedo truly are our biggest asset. Why?
Every individual in the team is unique, they have a diverse range of skills and specialisms, but the one thing they all have in common is a desire to learn. Our industry is constantly evolving and let’s face it, it’s impossible to be an “expert” in everything. Our people learn from each other daily, there’s a desire to not only share knowledge, but to absorb it too. Every day, we learn from each other – and not just in a top-down senior to junior fashion – an project manager with 25 years’ experience will regularly learn new things from an implementation consultant with 2.
For that to flourish the culture needs to enable it, and culture isn’t a tag line dictated from on-high, designed to attract new hires, it’s what happens organically around the people involved. You won’t find elitist types, cargo culters, or anyone suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect – we firmly believe that no-one can possibly know everything, and that there’s no such thing as a silly question. We have standards, sure, we have opinions, true – but they are weakly held, and everyone is open to new thinking.
The team is made up of various levels of expertise and experience – we have some with 25+ years’ experience, some with 10, and a handful of relatively new entrants to the world of software delivery. We have lean Six Sigma experts, UX specialists, Microsoft MVPs, we have repo owners of some of the most popular .net open-source projects on GitHub, we have people that have built massive systems, small systems, real time systems, wizards who can tune SQL queries to bend its optimiser to their will, process geeks who can Kanban their way to the moon – anything you can imagine in the tech space, we’ve got it covered.
Aside from the learning culture though – there’s a wild range of interests and outside specialisms. We’ve got cyclists, runners, skiers, snowboarders, video game players, musicians, Rubik’s cubers, podcasters, streamers, and even a resident PhD in astrophysics.
The Role
You’re the CIO of a large Legal Services Provider (typically based on the UK or Australia) and its time to change. It’s time to become more process driven, to be more profitable, to deliver more of your legal services digitally. It’s time to implement ShareDo.
Once a CIO has made that decision our Professional Services team will work with their team to get ShareDo implemented and delivering value to their business. As part of that implementation lifecycle there will be Requirements workshops, playbacks, sprints, business change, user acceptance testing and finally a hand-off to support.
We underpin that process with a bunch of different practices and processes; were not wedded to a single methodology but rather to the mantra of continuous process improvement.
Depending upon the client initiative we are assisting with ShareDo implementations can be both big (10+ people in the project team) or small (part-time project team). At any one point we are running between 20 and 25 of these projects.
For our clients success looks like : quicker more reliable, less costly implementations; easier business change and happy users; together with quicker realisation of business benefits .. simple!
For us success looks much the same with the addition of the ensuring the professional services function delivers consistent profitability to the overall business.
The project management role is designed to ensure the successful implementation of ShareDo for both our clients and ourselves.
A role that encompasses:
- Overall commercial accountability for a project
- Resource management responsibility across a portfolio of projects
- Working within the Service Delivery customer engagement process and driving continuous improvement
- Managing finances, planning, risk and client stakeholders and relationships
- Proactively managing and communicating with clients to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction
- Collaborating with internal teams to maintain an ongoing understanding of features and functionality and translate the information into best practices for customers
Who are you?
Clearly, we’re looking for not just an experience Project or Programme manager but some with a capability to deliver successful projects!
You’ll be strong on process, strong on change management, be a leader by example .. but a people person first and foremost.
You will be someone who relishes a challenge, someone who is driven by the satisfaction of creating something unique and of value.
You’re passionate about business change through technology and the possibilities that a product such as Sharedo can bring to business;]
You will be experienced in delivering projects and bringing them in on time and above customer expectation.
You will have attention to detail and have experience in project financial reporting.
You will have an understanding of SaaS architecture, modern software methodologies and the ability to communicate effectively with technical teams and understand the complexities of a product
You will have proven experience of managing projects using Agile methodologies and be capable of driving iterative delivery in a fast moving environment.
You will have excellent communication skills and be able to liaise between cross-functional teams, stakeholders and clients with the ability to translate technical concepts into language understandable to non-technical stakeholders.
You will have sharp analytical skills and be able to identify project risks, develop mitigation strategies and solve complex problems..
Lastly, the experience and education question.
Frankly, we’re slightly ambivalent. The number of years’ experience is irrelevant compared to the variety and relevance of that experience.
The Hiring process
- You get sent this job ad, you read it and can’t wait to apply.
- We invite you to a Teams call with one of our Professional Services team who will run through the basics with you.
- We invite you back for a more detailed interview (usually with the CCO) and introduce you to the founders.
- We make you an offer.
- You accept.
- You tell everyone how great your new job is.
- Your friends come and join you and you earn a sweet referral bonus.
The main interview
Interviews are always quite intense and stressful experiences (we’re probably as nervous as you!), but we don’t want you to worry or stress about it. Come along and just expect to talk about what you’ve done and the things you already know about.
You’ll be asked questions that go deeper and deeper into your experience, so that we can determine the breadth and depth of what you know, and what unique skills you might bring to the team.
During the course of that interview, remember that you’re also interviewing us – so feel free to come armed with deeply probing questions of your own to work out if we’re a good fit for you as well!
Advice
Don’t dress up – just come along, relax, have a chat and be yourself. We like to think we’re a friendly bunch.
Package and work style
You would be based at our offices in lovely Alderley Edge in Cheshire, but we offer a flexible working policy. Flex the times you start/finish as needed, work from the office or at home – whatever suits you. The only caveat is the “flexible working” isn’t fully remote though – we are a collaborative bunch and remote tech only gets us so far – we typically like to gather in groups at least once a week, at the office, so we can whiteboard ideas, collaborate, and, frankly, we just like to see you occasionally to say Hi in person.
Client visits are a given although are becoming increasingly rare and you are certainly not expected to be a “road warrior”. As a rough guide I would plan on a visit somewhere in the UK every couple of months.
Package wise, we offer an employer pension, BUPA medical cover (with the option to extend to your family), life insurance, critical illness cover and of course a salary. The salary range is £70-100k per annum depending on experience and skill set.
What are you waiting for? Apply already.
If you’ve gotten this far and are still thinking “this is me!” then please drop us a line – Sharedo is the kind of place that amazing people like you deserve to work!