Product Development Manager

Product Development Manager
Franchise Brands
Location - Remote with travel to Macclesfield
Full time, permanent
Salary: £70,000 - £95,000 DOE + benefits

Franchise Brands is an international, multi-brand franchisor focused on building market-leading businesses, primarily through a franchise model. The Group has a combined network of more than 625 franchisees across seven brands in the UK, North America and Europe.

Our market-leading brands include Metro Rod, Metro Plumb, Willow Pumps, Filta and Pirtek in Europe. They benefit from the Group's central support services, including Franchise Support, National Sales and Account Management, Information Technology, Marketing, Finance, Recruitment and HR.

We are looking for an experienced Product Development Manager to lead the technical delivery and continued development of our enterprise-scale work management platform, used by multiple clients across a range of industries.

This is a people-management role with strong technical depth. You will provide day-to-day leadership across development, analysis, testing and product disciplines, translating product and client requirements into secure, maintainable and deliverable technical outcomes.

Working closely with Product, Engineering, Project Management, Support and business stakeholders, you will guide solution design, strengthen engineering practices, remove delivery obstacles and protect the integrity of the core platform. Product and commercial awareness remain important, but the primary focus is technical leadership, engineering quality, team capability and dependable delivery.

You’ll be the technical compass for the team, guiding ideas from initial requirement through to successful release and support. You’ll challenge solutions, untangle complex problems and help shape secure, scalable technology built to last. Working alongside senior developers and technical specialists, you’ll influence key decisions across architecture, integrations, data and performance, champion great engineering practices and keep technical debt firmly on the radar.

You’ll keep delivery moving and the backlog healthy, turning plans into clear, achievable and testable work. Working across project and engineering teams, you’ll spot risks early, remove blockers and keep everyone sighted on progress. You’ll bring just enough process to keep things controlled without getting tangled in red tape - and ensure every release is properly tested, documented and ready for the real world.

You’ll lead a talented multidisciplinary team, giving people the clarity, coaching and confidence to do their best work. Through regular one-to-ones, mentoring and meaningful development opportunities, you’ll grow capability and encourage people to challenge ideas, solve problems together and take ownership. You’ll also help shape the team’s future through recruitment, onboarding, succession planning and smart capacity management.

You’ll help steer the platform roadmap, balancing brilliant ideas with technical reality, commercial value and operational risk. You’ll juggle core-product improvements, client needs, technical debt and defect fixes, ensuring the right work gets attention at the right time. As the bridge between technical and non-technical teams, you’ll turn complexity into plain English, explain the trade-offs and bring practical solutions - not just problems - to the table.

• Substantial experience delivering enterprise B2B software in a technical leadership, software development management, engineering management or comparable role.
• A good degree in Computing or a similar technical subject.
• Strong practical understanding of software architecture, application design, integrations, databases, APIs, source control, testing and deployment practices.
• The ability to review technical proposals, identify risks and trade-offs, and guide teams towards pragmatic solutions.
• Experience…