Portfolio Lead

The Portfolio Lead is accountable for delivery performance across a sub-domain of 4-6 pods (Engineering, Quality, Product). They lead the flow of value from idea to production, ensuring pods deliver with pace, predictability and understanding to outcomes.

They combine hands-on delivery leadership with AI-augmented ways of working and data-driven decision-making. They do not prescribe a single framework - instead they adapt approaches that best serve each pod's context.

They partner with Engineering and Product leadership to reduce waste, improve throughput and help pods achieve Autonomy, Accountability and Agreement to value outcomes.

What you will do

Pod Performance & Accountability

You are responsible for pod delivery performance across the sub-domain.

You will lead and communicate delivery health, risks and performance to leadership

Ensure pods operate as, self-organising units delivering value outcomes

Support pod leads with coaching, facilitation and conflict resolution

Ensure cross-pod agreement on priorities, dependencies and shared goals

Facilitate communication and collaboration between pods to promote knowledge sharing

Problem Solving

You will be an expert; deploy root cause analysis, systems thinking and structured techniques to analyse and guide out resolutions.

Be an escalation point for cross-pod blockers and systemic impediments

Identify patterns across pods that indicate deeper organisational or process issues

AI-Augmented Delivery

Champion AI agent adoption across pods - including coding agents, test generation, story creation, board health and deployment automation

Identify opportunities where AI can reduce toil, accelerate delivery or improve decision-making

Apply AI to improve delivery effectiveness, including workflow insights, risk prediction, and automation of reporting

Track and demonstrate the impact of AI on delivery performance

Flow & Efficiency

Monitor and improve delivery flow (lead time, cycle time, WIP, throughput) using Kanban and lean principles

Ensure WIP limits are respected and surface ageing items through Board Walks

Identify bottlenecks, ageing work and sources of delay across pods.

Improve through regular assessment and experimentation.

Support teams in breaking down work into deliverable, value-driven increments

Agile Ways of Working

Support and evolve the agile operating model for a pod-based environment focused on pace, not ceremony.

Adapt delivery approaches (Kanban, flow-based, lean) appropriate to each pod's needs

Ensure consistency of practice across pods without being prescriptive

Promote outcome-driven delivery vs output-driven activity

Guide teams to operate with autonomy and accountability

Metrics & Reporting

Define and maintain delivery metrics: cycle time, flow efficiency, lead time of initiative, PDLC compression, dependency reduction, rework rate, team satisfaction, and AI effectiveness

Build dashboards (cumulative flow diagrams, throughput charts, WIP ageing) that provide leadership visibility and lead informed decision-making

Analyse performance data to identify trends, patterns and areas for improvement

Use data to facilitate conversations and coach pods — not just track output

Stakeholder Management

Partner with Engineering and Product leadership at sub-domain level

Represent delivery health and risks in leadership forums

Build trusted relationships that allow fast decision-making

Communicate delivery performance to both technical and non-technical audiences

Commercial Awareness

Understand the commercial context of the sub-domain

Connect delivery decisions to revenue, cost, and customer impact

Support prioritisation trade-offs with a business lens

Capacity Planning

Forecast capacity across pods based on team composition, skills mix and upcoming demand

Identify resourcing gaps and support hiring/allocation decisions

Balance workload across pods to prevent burnout and underutilisation

Support realistic planning by ensuring pods have clear understanding of available capacity

Risk & Dependency Management

Manage risks through regular assessment and execution of controls

Ensure cross-pod dependencies are visible, tracked and managed

Track dependency cost (time blocked, items affected) and lead mitigations such as contract-first development and feature flags

Support issue escalations, ensuring intervention by the dependency escalation protocol

Coach & Capability Development

Provide hands-on coaching at pod level

Build capability in workflow management, flow thinking, estimation, planning, and data-led decision-making

Support teams in understanding and improving their own performance

Strengthen a culture of continuous improvement and learning

Outcome & Value Focus

Align delivery to always ensure outcomes and value.

Help teams understand the why behind their work and how their outputs contribute to value

Challenge work that does not link to outcomes

Support measurement of delivery against OKRs and value indicators

Centre of Excellence (CoE) Contribution

Be an active contributor to the CoE

Share best practices, delivery insights and improvement opportunities from pods

Support adoption of standards, playbooks and tools

Help evolve delivery practices based on experience