Currently recruiting for an IT Innovation Manager to join a leading professional services firm based in Central London. This position will help transform ideas into tangible and demonstrable innovation and change within the company and clients, often through digital services and products. Basically, turning ideas into reality.

Key Responsibilities

• Help drive innovation - both mindset and practical delivery - throughout the firm's employees and at all levels.
• Help the business areas create and define new opportunities, innovations and assess whether digital products can help deliver benefits for these areas.
• Help the business define the benefits of the change, short and long term, tangible and intangible and assess priority.
• Manage the "in-stream" innovation laboratory, including the inbound ideas, and ensuring the process delivers outputs against the agreed metrics.
• Help to manage and administer the internal innovation platform for all users, including helping people set innovation challenges and managing the ideas generated.
• Assist the Product Owner where required in our Agile/SCRUM development process, and interface into our internal and external development teams.
• Ensure the product is complete - i.e. the business strategy, the product specification, the business case and the technical requirements match the delivered solution, both commercially and technically.
• Liaise with the Business Relationship Managers to help manage the pipeline of incoming products, PoCs/prototypes and technology requests. Support them with captivating content to extend the reach of innovation within business units.
• Help manage the firm's innovation community to communicate product roadmap, and help develop new ideas and possible products.
• Assist in managing the external start-up innovation hub, setting challenges and managing start-up engagements generated by this.
• Help arrange and deliver learning and training across a range of skills and levels, in order to increase uptake of delivered innovation, and to improve Digital Mindset and client experience.

Key Skills and Experience

Essential Skills

• To be passionate about innovation and product development, from concept to delivery to ownership, with a demonstrable track record of successful products.
• To be able to champion ideas, innovation, digital, mobile and AI in a professional services environment.
• Ability to contribute to all aspects of product development, incl. business planning, costs/revenue projections, marketing/comms, operational planning, product requirements (including writing epics/features/stories and managing the product backlog), liaising with development teams and solution architects, change control, project timescales and costs, UX/UI and digital design, customer feedback and co-creation.
• Excellent knowledge of digital and mobile product creation, with attention to detail and the desire for products to look fantastic and delight customers.
• Ability to work with both internal delivery teams and external suppliers (including scouting, selection, managing commercial terms as well as actual delivery).
• Be able to manage challenging ideas full lifecycle, i.e. from soup to nuts, and analyse impact.

Additional Skills which would be advantageous in this role

• Product Management and Product Owner qualifications.
• Knowledge of the professional services sector, specifically accountancy areas of tax, audit and advisory, and the associated trends and products.
• Knowledge of innovation and product development lifecycles, product design and delivery methodology.
• Ability to organise product portfolio and manage backlog of change.
• General agile delivery and management skills.

Soft Skills

• Think and act differently.
• Be able to champion digital, mobile and new technologies within the organisation and externally.
• On top of market trends, technology developments, digital best practice and the ability to apply this to the firm's strategy.
• Excellent client facing skills - be able to work with all areas of the firm including partners, directors, colleagues alike to translate business strategy and opportunity into product delivery.