Head of Release Management

Job Title: Head of Release Management

Reporting To: Product Domain Director

Location: Bournemouth / Hybrid Working

Job Type: Full Time 37.5 hours a week

Our Purpose

Nourish Care provides a digital solution to the health and social care sector which improves the process of recording, analysing, and sharing of information. We seek to enhance and simplify care in equal measures; To harness the power of care management software to improve the lives of people who need care and those who provide it.

We are in the midst of one of the most exciting times in our history and while we are the current market leader in the sector, we will not be complacent. We are dedicated to our purpose of a better life for everyone. We continue to revolutionise the care sector and our incredible employees are what make this possible.

We're looking for a Head of Release Management to lead and shape how Nourish releases reach customers across multiple product delivery teams. This is a leadership role with a Product and GTM orientation — sitting at the intersection of R&D and our go-to-market teams, and owning the standards, coordination, and consistency that determine how a release lands.

You'll provide strategic direction and line management to a developing team of Release Managers, while also directly managing releases for a key product group made up of three delivery teams. Your mission is to create and embed a predictable, high-quality, and customer-focused release process that builds confidence across internal teams and customers alike.

The Role and Your Responsibilities

Team Leadership and Capability Building:

• Line-manage and support a developing team of Release Managers, focusing on building capability, consistency, and a shared operating model across the team.

• Coach the team on best practices, ensuring every Release Manager is working to a consistent standard regardless of which Product Manager or squad they are paired with.

• Foster a Product and GTM-oriented mindset across the team, ensuring the focus is always on the customer experience of a release, not just internal delivery mechanics.

• Support professional growth and create a team environment where individuals are developing their skills and confidence.

Hands-On Release Management

• Directly own the release lifecycle for a product group with three delivery teams, from planning through to go-live and post-release review.

• Drive toward predictable delivery outcomes, targeting 90% of releases delivered on schedule with no critical post-release incidents.

• Own release readiness criteria for your product group, ensuring all releases meet quality and customer experience standards before reaching customers.

• Establish and enforce controls around feature flagging, customer segmentation, and communications accuracy, ensuring customers receive releases as communicated.

Beta and Early Adopter Program (EAP) Management

• Own and formalise Beta and Early Adopter Program management as a core team responsibility, spanning the full lifecycle from pre-release preparation through to GA readiness.

• Oversee customer selection, onboarding, feedback collection, and synthesis across beta programmes, working closely with Product Managers to translate insights into release decisions.

• Define and embed the criteria for graduating features from beta to general availability, in alignment with Product and Customer Success.

• Ensure a consistently high-quality experience for beta customers, with the Release Management team acting as the primary point of coordination throughout.

GTM Coordination and Release Artifacts

• Own the release plan and all R&D-side artifacts, including release notes, internal briefings, rollout plans, and feature documentation, ensuring these are accurate, timely, and accessible to all relevant teams.

• Establish clear alignment with Product Marketing on artifact ownership and handoff points, ensuring no materials fall between the two teams without a named owner.

• Ensure GTM teams, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing, are fully briefed and equipped ahead of every significant release.

• Work in close partnership with Product Marketing, who own sales enablement materials and market-facing communications, to ensure a seamless handoff and consistent messaging.

Cross-Functional Release Coordination

• Act as the senior point of contact for cross-functional release coordination across Product, Engineering, Implementation, Customer Success, and Marketing.

• Drive earlier and more structured engagement of the Implementation team in the release lifecycle, establishing a defined trigger point for their involvement to prevent late-stage challenges.

• Facilitate release planning ceremonies and cross-functional checkpoints, maintaining momentum and resolving blockers across teams.

• Champion a consistent RM/PM operating model across all squads, including shared cadences, templates, and escalation paths, reducing inconsistency in the experience for GTM teams and customers.

Release Communication and Business Alignment

• Maintain comprehensive, real-time release documentation, including plans, timelines, dependencies, and decisions, accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

• Own the communication of release updates across the business, ensuring outputs from planning forums are translated into clear communications for GTM, CS, and Leadership, not just Product and Engineering.

• Lead the quarterly two-day Product/Engineering offsite, and extend its impact by ensuring outputs, insights, and actions are communicated broadly across the business.

• Provide proactive, audience-appropriate communications throughout the release cycle, ensuring no function is caught off guard by a release.

Release Metrics, Success Criteria and Continuous Improvement

• Ensure that measurable success criteria and impact metrics are defined for every significant release, established early in the lifecycle and aligned across Product, Customer Success, and GTM.

• Define and track KPIs related to release quality, timeliness, customer impact, and incident rates, using data to drive continuous improvement across the team.

• Lead retrospectives and post-release reviews, capturing lessons learned and embedding them into future release planning.

• Support initiatives aimed at improving internal satisfaction with product delivery processes, with a goal of achieving 70%+ satisfaction in internal surveys.

Process Ownership and Improvement

• Own and continuously improve the standard release management playbook, ensuring consistent processes are used across all teams and squads.

• Standardise tooling, templates, and checkpoints to ensure scalable and efficient release governance across the team.

• Identify bottlenecks and implement improvements to streamline delivery, reduce risk, and increase confidence in the release pipeline.

• Champion tooling and automation opportunities that improve the reliability, speed, and consistency of releases.

• A scalable, customer-focused release process is embedded and trusted across the organisation.

• 90% of releases are delivered on schedule with no critical post-release incidents.

• A consistent RM/PM operating model is in place across all squads, with documented, repeatable processes used across all teams.

• Beta and Early Adopter Programs are formalised and running effectively, with clear feedback loops into Product.

• GTM teams are fully briefed and equipped ahead of every significant release, with clear artifact ownership between Release Management and Product Marketing.

• Internal satisfaction with release and delivery processes exceeds 70% in annual surveys.

• The Release Management team is growing in capability, confidence, and consistency.

• Proven experience in release management, programme management, or product operations within a SaaS or software environment, with a mix of strategic oversight and hands-on execution.

• Strong line management or team leadership experience, ideally in growing or maturing teams, with a track record of building capability and consistency.

• Demonstrable experience working across Product, Marketing, and Customer Success functions. This is not an engineering-only role and candidates should be comfortable operating across R&D and GTM teams.

• A strong instinct for the customer experience of a release, with the ability to connect internal process decisions to external customer impact.

• Experience running structured customer beta or early adopter programmes is highly desirable

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align multiple functions around shared release goals and translate delivery complexity into clear updates for a range of audiences.

• A systematic approach to building consistency, comfortable defining playbooks, templates, and operating models and getting teams to adopt them

• Comfortable working within Agile development environments, with an understanding of the SDLC, but not limited to an engineering or Scrum Master orientation.

• Familiarity with tools like Jira, Confluence, and release tracking approaches is helpful, though not the primary focus of the role.

Nourish Benefits:

• 25 days basic annual leave, plus Bank Holidays

• In addition, we offer incremental leave benefit of 1 extra day for each completed year of service, up to a maximum of 5 additional days. This means long standing employees can enjoy up to 30 days of annual leave per year, plus bank holidays.

• Extra paid day off for your birthday

• Paid days off for volunteering opportunities

• Private Medical Insurance

• Pension

• Referral Bonus

• Health and Wellbeing platform including access to 24/7 GP & 24/7 EAP

• Counselling and support

• Variable impact workouts.

• Wellbeing videos including prompts for healthy behaviours

• Wellbeing, care and compassion leave policies

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Career Development opportunities and regular reviews

• Recognition and Rewards

• Social Events throughout the year

All positions at Nourish are subject to a satisfactory Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check, references and receipt of the appropriate Right to Work documents.

Nourish is proud to be an equal opportunities employer and we actively seek and embrace differences in thinking, experience, ethnicity, age, gender, faith, personalities and styles.

The different skills, experiences and backgrounds our employees bring to their roles creates a diverse and makes Nourish a special place to work