Digital Project Manager, We Are What We Do, London

Full-time role
Based in Farringdon, London
£32,000-£40,000 per annum
25 days annual leave
Matched pension contribution up to 2%

We Are What We Do is looking for an experienced, energetic Digital Project Manager to build, train and manage our second development team.

Digital development is at the heart of our work to change behaviours in positive ways and affect major social and environmental issues. This is reflected in an existing portfolio of digital behaviour change projects, such as Historypin and Buttons, and our continuing commitment to generating a stream of successful, powerful products and tools.

The role

We have an established development team and a tried and tested development process, but as demand for our digital services has risen, we’re looking to expand and build a second team with you at the helm.  In building this team with the CTO, the successful applicant will:

  • Identify skilled individuals and teams to perform the work

  • Pre-screen candidates based on CV/code submissions/language skills

  • Contribute to the interview and selection process

  • Refine our project management process based on your experience in similar roles

  • Embed the process in the new dev team

  • Monitor and report against agreed metrics on the performance of that team

  • Suggest and test improvements in the team, refine process documentation and share best practice across both teams

Both development team leaders will work closely with one another and our client-facing account managers to:

  • Ensure continuity across all digital projects

  • Validate requirements at project inception

  • Plan tests to later verify delivery of that functionality

  • Maintain an outstanding level of quality in all deliveries, from early-look alphas to client-facing UAT

  • Maintain automated regression test suites to ensure that new deployments do not break existing functionality

Internally within your team, the Digital Project Manager will:

  • Brief team members on requirements, ensure understanding, design work packages and agree interim deliverables

  • Schedule work across multiple projects, in multiple phases and by multiple developers

  • Track progress, identify potential pitfalls and proactively remove any barriers to a high-quality, punctual and on-budget delivery

  • Facilitate code reviews with senior developers and the CTO

  • Capture, document, share, schedule and ensure delivery of agreed actions at team meetings and reviews

  • Work locally and remotely with distributed team members, whose first language may not be English.

About you

The successful applicant will be able to demonstrate:

  • Familiarity with a number of project management methodologies, including but not limited to Waterfall, Agile / DSDM Atern, and V-model project management

  • Experience of building teams and delivering projects that have created, maintained and extended complex websites that were:

    • scalable

    • fault-tolerant

    • multi-lingual

    • multi-platform (web, mobile, API)

    • multi-sites

  • Proven track record of leading development teams, chairing meetings to agenda, keeping robust notes, tracking who’s waiting on what, resolving minor disputes

  • Familiarity with the kind of technologies used to produce modern websites, for example CMS, Databases, MVC programming, Browser support, Javascript, Linked Data and Semantic Web

  • Ability to communicate with, motivate and bring the best out of developers

  • Excellent verbal and written communications skills in reporting and documentation

  • You may/may not be a senior super-coder, but you might have some kind programming experience that you rely on to relate to developers and help them solve problems

  • A penchant for tea and cake preferable. An ability to contribute to Spotify playlists themed around random subjects mandatory.

About us

With 8 years experience, We Are What We Do, a not-for-profit company, virtually invented the sector of creative behaviour change. By applying its “Incidental Approach” – which builds positive behaviors into products and experiences that are desirable and useful in their own right – to major social and environmental problems, we are challenging the way government departments, corporates, NGOs, charities, creative agencies and individuals approach contemporary issues. Using new research and developments in psychology and cognitive behaviour science, we are helping reframe the debate around social change, showing how subconscious forces can be harnessed to affect our behaviours for good.

Our existing projects and future plans are made up of big social ambitions – we aim to harness the potential of new technology to make a difference to a massive mainstream audience, intelligently, creatively and practically. We want someone who shares our ambitions.

We Are What We Do’s digital prowess has also been shown both by our rapid international growth and our racking up of accolades (excuse the self trumpet blowing…). In the last year alone, our innovative community engagement and user interface design has earned us awards around the world, including a Webby, a Lovie, and a Tech4Good Innovation Award.

The job is also a chance to join a small team of intelligent, creative individuals who are all specialists in their own areas, each bringing different perspectives to any brainstorm, but who are united in a passion to produce excellent work of the highest creative and technical calibre, with considerable measurable impact on the social or environmental issues we are addressing.  Understanding and communicating with people is at the heart of everything we do so the ability to work as a team, to lead and to motivate people is an important requirement in this role.

Submission requirements

Your application should contain:

  • A short covering letter (200 word limit)

  • A current CV, illustrating your experience

  • Some project documentation (such as a Gantt chart, resource allocation graph or task tracking list) with a short explanation of a problem that you solved using it (200 word limit)

Please email your application to rebecka.mustajarvi@wearewhatwedo.org by 8pm Thursday 21st November.  Late submissions, or those not adhering to the submission requirements above will not be considered.  We will not work with agents or recruitment consultants to recruit this role.  Dear dear agents, please please do not ignore this as you will be wasting your precious time and ours.