Hotels and Restaurants - Technical Product Lead

Job Title: Technical Product Lead
Contract Type: Permanent
Location: Whitbread Court | Hybrid Working

Salary: £60-65,000 + Bonus and Benefits

Are you an experienced Product Owner or Product Lead who enjoys turning strategy into action and delivering technology that makes a real difference to guests and operational teams?

At Whitbread, we’re looking for a Technical Product Lead to join our Hotels & Restaurants Technology team. You’ll take hands-on product ownership across technology supporting our hotel operations and guest journeys, with a particular focus on areas such as self-service kiosks, keys and access solutions, security and other operationally critical hotel technology.

What you'll be doing:

• Own and maintain prioritised product backlogs across assigned Hotels & Restaurants technology products.
• Support the delivery and continuous improvement of technology including self-service kiosks, key and access solutions and associated security technologies.
• Translate product strategy and roadmap objectives into clear epics, features, user stories and delivery priorities.
• Act as the day-to-day product lead across Engineering, QA & Release, Service, Operations and Delivery & Change teams.
• Lead product refinement, planning, acceptance and review activities throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Work with the Technical Product Manager to shape roadmap priorities, sequencing, dependencies and trade-offs.
• Ensure access, security, resilience, service and operational requirements are considered from the outset when delivering guest and hotel technology.
• Collaborate with other Product Leads and Tech Leads to manage dependencies between digital products, physical technology and wider hotel systems.
• Partner with Operations and Business Change to ensure new technology is operationally ready, successfully rolled out and adopted by hotel teams.
• Track product performance, adoption, usage and value following go-live and use insight to drive continuous improvement.
• Manage product risks, issues and dependencies, escalating where appropriate.
• Work with third-party technology suppliers and partners to ensure delivery meets agreed priorities and standards.

What you'll need:

• Experience working as a Product Lead, Product Owner, Business Analyst, Delivery Lead or similar within a technology or digital environment.
• Experience working with kiosks, self-service technology, keys, physical/digital access solutions, security technology or similar customer-facing operational systems.
• A good understanding of access control, security, authentication and the operational considerations associated with guest-facing technology.
• Experience delivering technology into live, operationally critical environments, where reliability, resilience, security and usability are essential.
• Strong experience managing and prioritising product backlogs and translating business outcomes into actionable delivery requirements.
• Experience breaking roadmap objectives into epics, features, stories and acceptance criteria.
• Experience working closely with Engineering, QA, Release, Service and Change teams.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the confidence to challenge, influence and align different teams and priorities.
• The ability to balance customer value, operational impact, security, risk, cost and technical complexity when making product decisions.
• Strong planning, organisational and problem-solving skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and dependencies.
• A data-led approach, using product performance, adoption and user insight to inform decisions and improvements.

It would be great if you also have:

• Experience within hotels, hospitality, restaurants, retail, travel or another multi-site customer-facing environment.
• Experience delivering kiosk, key/access, security or other technology that combines physical hardware with digital platforms and services.
• Experience supporting large-scale technology transformation or multi-year product roadmaps.
• Experience working across complex environments with multiple platforms, integrations and operational dependencies.
• Experience working with third-party technology suppliers, hardware providers, partners or system integrators.

If you're a hands-on product professional who understands the challenges of delivering secure, reliable guest-facing technology into live operational environments, and you’re passionate about improving experiences through products such as kiosks, keys and access solutions, we'd love to hear from you.