Delivery Manager at Kobalt Music Group

Kobalt Intro:

​Kobalt is one of the world’s largest, most innovative music companies, using technology to power creative freedom, transparency, ownership and control for artists, songwriters, publishers, and labels. 

Founded in 2000 by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Ahdritz, the startup built a platform to maximize efficiency, accuracy, and transparency across the billions of micro-payments collected in today’s highly complex digital world. As the traditional music companies fought technology and contracted, Kobalt embraced it and grew, building an infrastructure and world-class creative team purposely designed to usher in the streaming era, along with a more fair, rewarding music business for creators. Our technology enables them to access royalty payments 4x faster while also maximising the royalty collection amounts.

With over 400 employees in 12 offices around the world, Kobalt today represents over 31,000 artists and songwriters, 700,000 songs and 600 publishing companies. Kobalt is proud to work with artists, songwriters, and companies like Childish Gambino, Max Martin, Paul McCartney and MPL Communications, Disney Music Group, and many more. 

Context: 

​​Kobalt continues to grow 3x faster than the market and as such has a continuous focus on scaling out its systems, products and services to cope with the increasing demand. One of the key opportunities for Kobalt is to address the masses of songwriters that are reasonably early in their careers and as such struggle to get representation from strong publishers. As most publishers depend on primarily manual processes, the cost of service usually outweighs the revenue potential that those songwriters would generate. Through technology, Kobalt aims to reduce the cost of service for each individual songwriter, making it viable to support large numbers of songwriters at a marginal cost.

Who is the Product Organisation ?

The Product organisation is made up of four distinct functions: Product Management, Programme & Delivery Management, UX & Design and Business Analysis. Each of these functions work together to create products and services for our B2C users (songwriters, artists etc) and B2B users (publishing companies and our internal teams, from Creative to Writer & Publisher Relations teams and more) 

Our products and technology have gone through significant transformation over the last few years and this role is part of building out a delivery function to ensure the right focus in meeting our numerous current and future delivery obligations.

Who is the Delivery Team?

• We are part of the wider Product organisation and provide services to Product, Engineering, Leadership, Stakeholders etc

We are a forming team, having grown from 1 to 4 people over the last year

• We provide programme, delivery, significant change delivery assistance in any way we can to add value to our delivery partners (leadership, engineers, product managers, design practice, stakeholders etc)

Recent Projects:

• We are more than a year into a large technology transformation programme to refresh our technology stack and scale our technology for increased business opportunities
• It is a multi-year portfolio of work

What you will bring:

Agile Leadership:

• able to execute, adopt and scale agile methodologies across projects, programmes, the portfolio or works, with emphasis on increasing KTech's agile maturity
• pragmatism in application of agile principles, necessary process with minimum overhead
• change advocate and change agent, driving the agile mindset and principles throughout the organisation and in particular technology

Delivery Management:

• oversight and active contribution to the successful execution of projects (sometimes parachuting in the middle of execution to bring back on track), while ensuring overall alignment with organisational goals and objectives
• demonstrable ability to develop and maintain project timeline realisations (hybrid mix of agile roadmaps, prioritisation of portfolio roadmap initiatives, release plans, timelines), budgets, effective capacity planning, and agile measurement methods (estimation, planning, timeline tracking)
• necessary hands on and lean-in approach and skills in the delivery management sphere, quickly becoming a trusted member of chosen teams

Team Collaboration:

• ability to foster a collaborative and transparent environment within and traversing cross-functional teams
• super-informative and effective communication style pitched at the right level for the audience, ensuring all team members, stakeholders, and wider, are informed both within teams and across team boundaries

Agile Coaching:

• hands-on agile coaching to teams, ensuring continuous improvement is front of mind and actively practised
• mentoring experience, genuine desire to help team managers, leads, members, product owners, identify and help to remove impediments
• experience of overcoming resistance to elements of agile adoption, i.e. has an ‘engagement toolkit’

Scrum and hybrid agile adoption:

• assist the teams in the continued roll-out and refinement of Scrum and scaled agile principles, tailoring approaches to suit project and team needs while maintaining a reasonably consistent approach
• pragmatic practices for efficient workflow management, within a single team and across multiple agile teams

Stakeholder Engagement and Communications:

• actively identifies risks, assesses, and works to mitigate project risks, taking a personal interest in following through to mitigation
• strategies and techniques to address potential obstacles and challenges, standard risk management methods that reduce the chances of a risk transpiring as an issue

Whats we look for: 

• You will have a real passion for creating order and clarity in everyday work situations. You love to work with different skill sets, from highly technical developers, skilled designers, to product management experts. You’ll bring the energy to delivery projects

• You will bring sufficient knowledge of agile digital delivery management, methodologies, processes, delivery experience, with hands on experience in using your skills toolkit to enable you and delivery teams to work effectively to time, cost, quality, constraints, to deliver value time and again

• You are able to work relatively autonomously without continual assistance

• You understand and can effectively collaborate in a 3 amigos relationship (Delivery, Engineering, Product)

• You are quite comfortable with ambiguity, and actively work to address ambiguity and gain consensus on delivery outcomes and timing, through collaboration and clarity of purpose. You are able to work with delivery teams to understand the value of the delivery

• You understand the value of empathy and emotional intelligence with colleagues, and maintain an even disposition even in the face of adversity. You value feedback from colleagues and seniors alike, as a development opportunity

• Familiarity with industry standard tooling and frameworks required to manage agile delivery (e.g. Jira, Advanced Roadmaps, Confluence, OKRs, project and portfolio planning - roadmaps) as well as strong delivery management discipline

• The desire to learn and stretch yourself as part of your ongoing development plan. You take responsibility for your career and professional development, by reading, attending seminars both directly and indirectly related to your role, and where approved, funded training

What does success look like:

• You quickly build a track record of successful digital delivery over time. Measured through success metrics (delivery cost, time, quality)

• You bring a strong delivery service perspective. You understand the value of good delivery management and your colleagues understand the value as well
• Your energy and passion for delivery management are clear and apparent to your colleagues, delivery teams, and stakeholders
• You are able to understand and align the goals of the project, initiative or change
• You bring clarity of purpose to the delivery function and this is apparent in projects or initiatives you are responsible for delivering
• On time, cost, quality are normal achievements for you, not the exception
• You understand what it takes to ensure delivery is smooth, on time and cost to scope

What do we offer:

• Salary Range: Discuss with the Talent Partner. 
• Flexible working. KTech operates with a hybrid working policy (fully remote possible). 
• 25 days annually. 
• 1 wellbeing day per quarter.
• Half day summer Fridays (July and August). 
• Christmas closure.
• Meeting free Fridays afternoon outside of the summer months. We use this as dedicated learning time. 
• 5% pension contribution. 
• Health Insurance. 

Interview Process and our commitments to you:

• We are committed to completing the process in 3 working weeks and are willing to be flexible to meet the candidates requirements. 

• We are also committed to providing feedback on each interview no longer than 48hrs after the interview via email, telephone call or ZOOM.