Lead Implementation Manager

Department: IT & Change

Location: Manchester, UK

Description We are looking for a Lead Implementation Manager to own the end-to-end technical delivery of our software to external clients — from kick-off through to live, adopted, and referenceable. You will be the single point of accountability for each implementation: orchestrating the customer, our product and engineering teams, and third parties so that complex software lands cleanly, on time, and to the value the client signed up for.

Key Responsibilities

• Own delivery of the implementation lifecycle for a portfolio of client accounts, from deployment, configuration, and testing through to training, adoption, and handover to ongoing support.
• Build and maintain robust delivery plans, RAID logs, and governance rhythms, proactively managing scope, timelines, dependencies, and risk in line with client regulatory and compliance frameworks.
• Use product analytics and business analysis to drive implementations to a clear "done" state, where the client is live, adopting the product, and realising intended outcomes.
• Act as the trusted senior point of contact for client stakeholders, from operational users through to executive sponsors.
• Manage expectations and navigate competing priorities, holding firm but constructive lines on scope and commercial boundaries.
• Translate fluidly between business intent and technical reality, ensuring clear communication between clients and internal teams.
• Work closely with product and engineering teams, validating releases, triaging issues, and representing customer technical needs with precision.
• Read and reason about configurations, data structures, integration patterns, and API behaviour well enough to scope work accurately and challenge estimates.
• Feed structured, prioritised insight back into the product roadmap based on real implementation experience.
• Produce clear, concise status and risk reporting for executive and leadership audiences, with a defensible view on RAG status, risk, and forecast.
• Surface escalations early, bringing options and recommendations to leadership.
• Codify best practice through playbooks, templates, and repeatable implementation methodology that raise the bar across the team.

What We're Looking For

• Substantial experience in technical implementation, technical customer success, technical project/programme management, or solutions delivery for software products sold to external clients (SaaS / enterprise software).
• Demonstrable track record of personally owning complex, multi-stakeholder software implementations through to successful go-live and adoption.
• Strong project management discipline, including planning, dependency and risk management, and governance, with the judgement to know when to apply rigour and when to move fast.
• Excellent stakeholder management, up to and including executive/C-level sponsors, with the gravitas to hold difficult conversations and the empathy to keep relationships strong.
• Technical fluency, comfortable reading configurations, data mappings, logs, and API documentation, and able to converse credibly with engineers and challenge technical assumptions.
• Clear, structured written and verbal communication, including executive-level reporting.
• Comfortable operating autonomously and ambiguously as the most senior delivery person in the room.
• Experience implementing AI / ML or data-intensive products is desirable, along with an understanding of the specific delivery nuances these bring, such as data readiness, model behaviour, and explainability.
• Exposure to regulated environments, such as financial services or FCA-regulated settings, is desirable, along with familiarity with the governance and risk expectations involved.
• Familiarity with integration concepts such as APIs, webhooks, SSO, and data pipelines, and tooling such as Jira/Confluence, is desirable.
• Experience shaping implementation methodology or playbooks at a team or organisational level is desirable.
• A relevant certification, such as PMP, PRINCE2, or Agile/Scrum, is useful but not required.