Head of Strategic Delivery
The role is responsible for ensuring the business can successfully deliver complex partner implementations, cross-functional initiatives, business change, and other strategically important work. It provides the operational leadership, delivery expertise, and coordination needed where work spans multiple teams, functions, or territories.
The Head of Strategic Delivery leads the Deployment Project Management team and is accountable for building a high-performing delivery function. This includes developing people, establishing practical delivery standards, improving tooling and ways of working, and creating a function recognised across the business as a trusted centre of expertise for strategic delivery. The role works closely with the Global Director, Enterprise Execution to translate enterprise priorities into successful delivery, while providing practical insight from day-to-day delivery back into the wider organisation.
This role is suited to someone who enjoys building teams, improving capability, and helping organisations successfully deliver their most important work. Success comes from combining strong leadership, practical judgement, and a relentless focus on delivering value for partners and the business.
- Lead, develop and coach the Deployment Project Management team.
- Build a high-performing function recognised for delivery expertise, sound judgement, and commercial awareness.
- Manage recruitment, capability, workload, performance, and professional development across the team.
- Establish a collaborative culture where people are empowered to solve problems, make good decisions, and continuously improve.
- Act as the senior operational escalation point for delivery, resolving issues wherever possible before executive escalation is required.
- Lead delivery of complex partner implementations, cross-functional initiatives, organisational change, and other strategically important work.
- Ensure delivery remains focused on the commercial outcomes and business value each initiative is intended to achieve.
- Exercise sound judgement throughout delivery, identifying risks, dependencies, assumptions, and opportunities early.
- Challenge delivery approaches where experience suggests outcomes are unlikely to achieve the intended value.
- Provide hands-on delivery leadership where complexity, scale, or risk requires senior involvement.
- Lead the successful mobilisation and onboarding of strategic partners.
- Ensure partner implementations are structured, coordinated, and delivered to a consistently high standard.
- Build trusted relationships with partners through clear communication, strong execution, and effective issue resolution.
- Continuously improve partner onboarding by developing practical, repeatable playbooks while recognising where flexibility is required.
- Support implementation and ongoing improvement of the managed services operating model.
- Work with territory and functional leaders to clarify ownership, operational readiness, and delivery expectations.
- Identify operational issues early and work across the business to resolve them before they impact delivery.
- Support effective transition from implementation into business-as-usual and managed service arrangements.
- Continuously improve delivery standards, playbooks, templates, and ways of working.
- Select and implement delivery tooling that improves visibility, collaboration, and decision-making across the function.
- Introduce practical use of automation and AI where it improves delivery quality, consistency, efficiency, or decision-making.
- Build delivery capability that scales with the organisation while remaining pragmatic and proportionate.
- Build strong working relationships across product, technology, commercial, territories, and managed services.
- Work constructively across organisational boundaries to maintain momentum and resolve delivery challenges.
- Provide clear communication, realistic expectations, and practical leadership throughout delivery.
- Bring practical insight from delivery back into the business, identifying recurring issues, operational bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
- Proven experience leading complex strategic delivery in technology-enabled or product-led organisations (required).
- Experience leading and developing delivery professionals (required).
- Experience delivering cross-functional initiatives involving product, technology, commercial, and operational teams (required).
- Able to build credibility with engineers, product managers, commercial teams, partners, and senior stakeholders (required).
- Experience improving delivery capability through better standards, tooling, and ways of working (required).
- Strong commercial judgement and emotional intelligence (required).
- Calm, pragmatic, and balanced under pressure (required).
- Able to balance strategic thinking with practical execution (required).
- Focused on value and outcomes rather than process for its own sake (required).
- Comfortable operating where priorities evolve and ambiguity exists (required).
- Builds trust through sound judgement, collaboration, and consistent delivery (required).
FairPlay Sports Media is a global sports media network that builds and engages communities of sports fans and bettors to create value for its betting, advertising and media partners. Previously known as Oddschecker Global Media, it rebranded in 2024 and traces its origins to oddschecker, which launched in 1999. Its portfolio includes oddschecker, WhoScored, vime, the Confido Network and CasinoSmash, processing around 100 million data updates per week and reaching over 100 million unique users monthly. Headquartered in London, the group works with more than 100 partners worldwide.