Client Lead

About the role

This role leads the team and operating system behind one of our largest and most important client relationships: a globally recognised organisation in major US sport. The work is high-volume and unusually broad, spanning content and publishing operations, design delivery, analytics and analysis, client projects, product and engineering coordination, releases, integrations, live-event readiness and a growing set of AI-enabled services.

You will give the team clarity, pace and high standards; help specialists do their best work; and stop important work from depending on senior leaders chasing it. This is an operational and people-leadership role. It is not primarily a product-management, sales or account-director position.

Sports Context

The client is in major US sport, where a playoff run, Draft, trade, injury, live-game issue or major campaign can change the shape of the week immediately. Basketball knowledge is useful because it helps you anticipate those moments, understand their importance and organise the team accordingly. You do not need to be a basketball analyst. You do need to be interested enough to understand the season, the audience and why timing matters.

What You Will Own

• Lead and develop the multidisciplinary team delivering work for the account.
• Maintain one clear operating picture across priorities, owners, deadlines, dependencies, risks and decisions.
• Set the team's workload and standards, inspect delivery and intervene early when quality, pace or performance slips.
• Run a high volume of work across content, publishing, design, analytics, client projects, releases, integrations and AI-enabled services.
• Turn unclear requests into a practical plan: the outcome, scope, owner, next action, dependency, deadline and decision required.
• Use operating, audience and delivery data to diagnose problems and make decisions, not simply report activity.
• Work closely with design, content, product, engineering, support and client leaders without pretending to replace their specialist judgement.
• Help functional leaders manage priorities and handoffs, provide operational cover when they are unavailable and prevent one account from consuming all of their capacity.
• Lead large, ambiguous operational projects, including audits and migrations, while keeping live delivery moving.
• Improve the operating system itself. This includes simplifying fragmented tracking, moving appropriate work from Airtable into Linear and building useful review rhythms, automations and controls.
• Recognise when a growing area needs clearer ownership, a different process or a specialist hire; define the need, help hire the right person and make the resulting capability work.
• Prepare concise, accurate client updates and lead day-to-day delivery conversations, including incidents and difficult news.
• Make sensible day-to-day decisions independently and escalate only the decisions that genuinely need senior or specialist input.

What Good Looks Like

• The team knows what matters, what they own, when it is due and what good looks like.
• Material work has a current owner, status, next action and decision path.
• Missed commitments and quality problems trigger early intervention rather than late surprises.
• Content and design work has active capacity, priority and handoff management.
• Large projects are broken into workable phases with clear leadership and follow-through.
• Client updates are timely, candid and connected to real delivery state.
• Repeated operational pain becomes a better process, tool, automation or ownership model.
• AI is used to improve speed, analysis, quality and repeatability, with important outputs checked and owned by the team.
• Senior leaders can set direction and inspect outcomes without running the account's daily work.

What We Are Looking For

• High agency: you create forward motion without waiting for perfect instructions.
• Strong judgement: you can decide what matters now, what stops, what waits, what needs more evidence and what needs escalation.
• Direct people leadership: you have set standards, allocated work, coached people, handled performance problems and remained accountable for the team's output.
• Operational grip: you can run several different workstreams at once without losing the detail or drowning the team in process.
• Numeracy and analytical ability: you can interrogate imperfect data, find the signal and turn it into a decision.
• Clear communication: you can explain complex work simply to team members, specialists and senior client stakeholders.
• Cross-functional range: you are comfortable working across content, design, analytics, projects, product, engineering and service delivery.
• Systems thinking: you improve the mechanism behind the work rather than relying on repeated manual effort or individual heroics.
• Practical AI fluency: you use AI and agents to improve real operating loops, validate the output and drive adoption.
• Pace and resilience: you can stay calm, make decisions and reorganise the work when priorities change quickly.
• Attention to detail: you notice the small errors, weak handoffs and missing ownership that become larger problems later.
• Genuine interest in basketball and sport: you understand how live games, tentpoles, player news and the shape of a season change operational priorities.

Helpful Experience

Relevant experience may come from client operations, delivery leadership, content or publishing operations, programme management, product operations, support operations, media, sport or another high-volume environment. We care more about what you have actually led, decided and improved than a particular job title.

Strong candidates will be able to show:

• Responsibility for direct reports and difficult people decisions;
• Ownership of several simultaneous workstreams across different disciplines;
• A consequential decision made from incomplete evidence;
• A process, system or operating model they materially improved;
• An example of helping specialists or functional leaders deliver better;
• A capability gap they closed through clearer ownership, process change or hiring; and
• Practical AI use that improved a measurable outcome.

What This Role Is Not

• A product manager responsible for designing the client's app or owning its roadmap.
• A conventional account director focused mainly on relationships, renewals and expansion.
• A creative director replacing the design lead.
• A project coordinator who records actions but does not own outcomes.
• A specialist expected to personally perform every kind of work on the account.