Product Quality & Operations Lead

Department: Product

Reports to: Head of Product

Team: Product Analysts and Product Operations Managers

Location: Abu Dhabi or Dubai

Employment type: Full-time

Role Purpose

The Product Quality & Operations Lead is a Product Excellence role: it exists to make the entire Product organisation operate like a well-run, high-performing function, not just to keep the trains running on time. This is a newly created role, responsible for a team of Product Analysts and Product Operations Managers who together give every product squad the infrastructure, cadence, and trusted data they need to work fast without losing rigor.

The role spans two areas: Operational Excellence (the tools, ceremonies, and development-lifecycle gates that keep squads running consistently) and Data & Quality (the metrics, dashboards, and quality measures that tell leadership whether the product organisation is genuinely delivering). This is the first time these two areas will be run as a single, unified function — the successful candidate will shape how the team operates from the ground up.

Because this role sets the standards the whole Product organisation is measured against, the person needs to be a strong product mind in their own right — someone who has been a good Product Manager, understands what makes a product organisation genuinely well run, and can translate that judgement into the processes, metrics, and rigor this function owns. A core outcome of the role is the credibility of Product with the rest of the business: making sure the drivers of product work, what each team is delivering, and the business-facing, leading metrics that matter are clearly understood, well communicated, and sit at the heart of everything Product Operations does.

Key Responsibilities

1. Team Leadership

• Hire, coach, and manage a team of Product Analysts and Product Operations Managers.

• Set priorities and operating rhythm across the team, balancing analyst-led data work with manager-led operational work.

• Represent Product Quality & Operations in senior leadership forums as the trusted source on product delivery health and data quality.

2. Data, Analytics & Quality (delivered through the Product Analysts)

• Quality measurement: own the product organisation's core quality/reliability metric and its calculation methodology, auditing it for consistency across squads.

• Metrics & dashboards: drive the build-out and instrumentation of the product organisation's key metrics and reporting dashboards.

• Reporting standards: ensure reporting is consistent and comparable across teams, so leadership can trust the numbers coming from every squad.

• Partnership: work with wider Data/BI functions to keep dashboards current, accurate, and decision-ready.

3. Operational Excellence (delivered through the Product Operations Managers)

• Product Development Lifecycle: own consistent discovery, design review, QA, and launch-retro gates across all squads.

• Tooling administration: own the product management platform (e.g. Productboard or equivalent) — user/license management, team mapping, automations, and sync with delivery tools like Jira.

• Research operations: own user recruitment, focus groups, and field/site visits, and set up direct channels connecting Product Managers with users.

• Governance & reviews: run monthly/quarterly business reviews and PRD reviews, and ensure governance gates (e.g. compliance, risk) are followed so status reporting is accurate.

What Success Looks Like

• A well-led team, with clear ownership split between operational delivery and data/quality work.

• Product tooling is accurately maintained and consistently adopted across squads.

• Every squad follows a consistent development lifecycle, with governance gates genuinely met, not just checked off.

• Core quality/reliability metrics are fully instrumented, regularly audited, and trusted by leadership.

• Research and user access is easy for Product Managers to tap into, with a healthy, well-run participant pipeline.

• The rest of the business has a clear, shared understanding of what drives Product's work, what each team is delivering, and the leading, business-facing metrics that show whether Product is succeeding — with Product Operations recognised as the reason that clarity exists.

Skills & Experience

• Product craft: experience as a Product Manager or in a similar product-facing role, with a genuine understanding of how a well-run product organisation operates — this is a product excellence role, not a purely administrative one.

• Data Insights: Ability to transfer data into meaningful and useful insights across the organisation

• Leadership experience: proven experience leading a product operations, program management, or analytics function, including direct people-management experience — this is a genuine team-leadership role, not an individual-contributor position.

• Data & measurement: strong data instincts, comfortable defining a rigorous, auditable quality/reliability framework and defending it under pressure from delivery teams.

• Process design: track record designing and running operating cadences — lifecycle gates, ceremonies, business reviews — across multiple teams.

• Tooling: hands-on experience administering a product management platform (e.g. Productboard, Aha!, Jira Product Discovery).

• Research coordination: experience coordinating user research logistics, including participant recruitment and field/site visits.

• Stakeholder management: able to work confidently across Product, Delivery, Data/BI, Design, and Compliance/Risk functions.

• Sector experience: financial services, fintech, or emerging-market consumer product experience is a strong plus.