Lead Technical Programme Manager

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.

Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [email protected].

Role

We are looking for a Lead Technical Programme Manager to take on our most complex technical and cross-functional programmes, in an environment of rapid, iterative experimentation and transition as we integrate with our new parent company, eBay.

As part of a supportive, lean and passionate team of Technical Programme Managers, you will lead work that spans multiple teams and functions within Depop and our parent company. You’ll create clarity in ambiguity, make sure our brilliant teams across the business are set up to deliver impact efficiently, and design the ways of working that make that repeatable and friction-less. 

This is a senior individual contributor role with high levels of breadth and reach. You’ll work alongside leadership from every part of the business, and raise the bar for the wider function by contributing to how we operate and evolve. 

Responsibilities

Programme leadership: 

• Lead Depop’s most technically complex and ambiguous programmes, spanning multiple teams, functions and dependencies - working with functional leads to define the objectives, constraints and measures of success where they don’t yet exist
• Anticipate and manage risks, issues and dependencies across domains, driving the decisions and trade-offs needed to maintain momentum and build stakeholder trust
• Ensure workstream visibility and alignment for broad sets of stakeholders and contributors via self serve reporting and single sources of truth 
• Make complex work understandable and keep accountability clear at every level

Operational strategy & analysis: 

• Shape and influence trade-offs anchored in measurable business impact, helping leadership decide where to focus whilst providing clarity for teams
• Design and improve the cross-functional systems, planning approaches and rhythms that scale beyond a single team, reducing duplication and increasing pace
• Guide and support your workstreams through our lightweight quarterly and annual reflections and objective setting processes
• Facilitate planning and decision-making conversations, building alignment that holds where perspectives conflict or information is incomplete
• Craft and share high quality communications that succinctly deliver key messages to broad audiences including senior executives

Advancement of Depop’s outcome orientated operating model: 

• Identify and solve the systemic and nuanced problems in how we plan and deliver across domains and companies
• Use AI or other tooling to take friction and grunt work out of how we operate whilst balancing value, quality, accuracy and safety - and help your peers to do the same
• Apply your in-depth knowledge of lean product & technical operations to facilitate, coach and share learnings which empower teams to iteratively improve their ways of working and deliver more effectively
• Act as a role model for the function and our learning mindset - mentoring and coaching others, regularly sharing your knowledge and reflections

Qualifications:

Requirements

• You have extensive technical programme management experience, with a proven track record of leading multiple technically complex programmes across teams and functions
• You’re comfortable operating without a playbook - you can take a strategic or partly unknown problem space, define what success looks like and why, and get people moving
• You have excellent stakeholder management, influencing and relationship building skills, and are trusted by senior stakeholders to align them quickly and cut through decision drift
• You have exceptional communication skills, and can tailor your message to suit your audience’s needs (who may or may not be technical), using empathy and active listening to read situations quickly
• You're adept at driving accountability through others, and have the courage to hold a difficult position with stakeholders without damaging the relationship 
• You’re user and business value driven, making trade-offs anchored in measurable business impact rather than feasibility alone
• You’re a highly organised and pragmatic systems thinker, using your understanding of agile/lean tools and techniques to problem-solve and optimise cross-functional systems at scale without adding unnecessary process
• Approachable with advanced skills in facilitation, coaching and mediation, you’ll have a natural talent for creating the space for strategic and timely decision-making
• You actively contribute to the function, mentoring others, sharing your expertise and learnings
• You have high technical and product literacy, you’re able to hold your own in technical discussions and challenge assumptions in support of the overall programme outcomes

Nice to have:

• You have experience working as a consultant, or in a fast paced, product scale up environment and have an instinct for spotting opportunities and synergies
• You're AI-native in how you work - using AI tooling to remove teams grunt work and get to outcomes faster, with the judgement to know where it adds value and where quality, accuracy or safety mean it should be applied (or not) thoughtfully. 

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly
  

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees 
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!