Programme Management Office (PMO) Lead

OUR MISSION To become the car-changing destination of choice. By combining technology, media and deep automotive expertise, we’ve turned how people buy, sell, advertise and lease cars on its head. What started as a simple reviews site is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe. Last year alone we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service. In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia - creators of AutoExpress and Evo magazines -doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with almost 10m subscribers and over 1.1 billion annual views, while we sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350 million. And we’re a long way from done! CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT & TRANSFORMATION @ CARWOW Carwow’s growth story is built on bold strategic moves: organic scale, partnerships, and acquisitions like Autovia. Delivering moves of that size takes serious programme discipline. That means clear governance, a real plan, owned risks, and someone who pushes cross-functional teams to an outcome rather than just tracking them. That’s the job of the PMO. It’s a small, senior, high-leverage team that owns how Carwow’s most important cross-functional and corporate-development programmes actually get delivered, including our most demanding work: post-merger integrations and business separations. This is hands-on leadership with direct line-of-sight to the most consequential decisions being made at Carwow. YOUR MISSION As PMO Lead, you own how Carwow’s most important programmes get delivered. You build and run the programme-management capability, covering the governance, planning, reporting and delivery rigour, and you personally lead the highest-stakes programmes from start to finish, including post-merger integration and business separation work. You bring order to complexity, make the plan real, hold the organisation to it, and give senior leadership a clear, honest view of what’s on track, what’s at risk, and what decisions are needed. You set the operating rhythm, chair the rooms, and keep dozens of moving parts across technology, data, finance, people and commercial all pointing in the same direction. Success looks like: priority programmes delivered to plan; governance that is trusted rather than tolerated; risks surfaced early and owned; and a leadership team that can rely on a single, credible source of truth on delivery. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Build and run the PMO: - Governance, standards & tooling: Establish and own the programme-management operating model. That covers integrated planning, risk / assumption / issue / dependency (RAID) management, change control, a standardised reporting cadence and a clear set of KPIs, and getting all of it adopted across teams. - Portfolio oversight: Own the cross-programme view of strategic and corporate development initiatives: priorities, dependencies, critical path and resourcing conflicts. Surface what’s at risk early and drive it to resolution. - Lead delivery of the highest-stakes programmes: - Hands-on programme leadership: Personally lead the most complex, high-visibility programmes, including post-merger integration and business separations, from planning through cutover / go-live, stabilisation and close. - Run the governance forums: Set agendas, drive pre-reads, chair working groups and steering committees, support executive steering, and track every decision and action to closure. - Drive outcomes across the business: - Cross-functional leadership: Coordinate workstream leads across Product, Data, Finance, People, Marketing, Commercial and Technology, alongside external advisers, influencing without formal authority to keep delivery moving and decisions unblocked. - Risk, change & escalation: Manage risk, change and escalation crisply, so the right matters reach the right forum quickly a