Head of Product Support

About the role

The Head of Product Support will establish and lead a global, standardised Product Support function within Enterprise IT, consolidating currently fragmented application support teams into a single accountable capability. This function will act as the first point of engagement for all product-related incidents and requests, ensuring effective triage, resolution, and routing across Product Support, Service Operations, and Product Engineering.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and Lead the Product Support Function
• Consolidate all LoB application support teams into Enterprise IT
• Build a globally consistent operating model across regions and divisions
• Define roles, capability expectations, and team structures
• Lead a follow-the-sun support model (location strategy to be defined separately)
• Own Application-Layer Triage and Routing
• Ensure all product incidents and requests are routed through Product Support as the single entry point for applications
• Drive consistent triage outcomes:
• Resolved within Product Support
• Escalated to Service Operations (infrastructure/platform)
• Escalated to Product Engineering (defects / change backlog)
• Ensure high-quality classification of issues to reduce misrouting and delays
• Standardise Processes, Tooling, and Ways of Working
• Define and enforce standard triage, escalation, and problem management processes
• Align all workflows to ServiceNow as the enterprise ITSM platform
• Eliminate fragmented tooling and inconsistent practices across divisions
• Establish standard:
• SLAs and OLAs
• Ticket taxonomy and categorisation
• Knowledge capture and reuse
• Implement reporting across the full product support lifecycle:
• Incident volumes and trends
• Recurring defects and technical debt
• Product-level stability and reliability
• Recurring incident patterns and operational risks
• Provide Enterprise IT leadership with clear insight into application health, service stability, recurring incidents trends, and systemic issues
• Enable Continuous Improvement via Product Feedback Loops
• Ensure all recurring and material issues are translated into:
• Product backlog items
• Problem records and root cause analysis
• Work with Product Teams to:
• Reduce incident demand
• Eliminate recurring defects
• Improve product stability and service reliability
• Lead Transformation and Optimisation
• Assess existing teams across capability, scale, and duplication
• Support identification of shadow IT operations and bring into scope of transformation and optimisation
• Define and execute a future-state Product Support strategy, including:
• Standardisation of roles and processes
• Tooling convergence
• Organisational optimisation
• Automation and self-serve reduction
• Develop measurable improvements in:
• Cost efficiency
• Service quality
• Scalability
• Develop and promote self-service capabilities for known incidents and requests
• Assess and plan the integration impact of M&A activity on Product Support capabilities, ensuring rapid alignment to the target operating model without service disruption

Stakeholder and Executive Leadership

• Act as a senior interface to:
• Divisional CIOs
• Business leadership
• Product and Engineering teams
• Manage transition to centralised model while maintaining business confidence and service continuity
• Enforce standards with authority, in collaboration with Enterprise IT leadership

Essential Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• Proven leadership of application / product support at scale (multi-region preferred)
• Strong understanding of: Incident, request, and problem management (ITIL-aligned); Triage models and escalation frameworks
• Experience standardising fragmented support models across multiple teams
• Experience implementing or operating ServiceNow (or equivalent ITSM platform)
• Strong stakeholder management at senior and executive level
• Demonstrated ability to lead organisational consolidation and transformation

Desirable Experience

• Experience across both: Infrastructure / Service Operations; Product / application support or engineering
• Experience in federated organisations moving to centralised models
• Exposure to global operating models and cost optimisation initiatives

Leadership Profile

• Strong ownership of end-to-end application service outcomes
• Comfortable enforcing standards across diverse teams and regions
• Pragmatic and execution-focused (not theoretical transformation)
• Data-driven, with focus on measurable improvement
• Credibility across both technical and business stakeholders

Success Measures (Indicative KPIs)

• % of product support teams consolidated under Enterprise IT
• Reduction in duplicated tooling and processes
• Improvement in: First-time fix rate, SLA adherence, time to triage and correct routing
• Reduction in recurring incidents
• Improved product stability and up-time
• Increased visibility of product-level performance
• Contribution to overall cost-to-serve reduction
• % of automated (including self-service) incidents and requests
• End user and business satisfaction, including CSAT