Innovation Delivery Lead

Job Details: Innovation Delivery Lead

Full details of the job.

Who We Are Since its inception, Aventum Group has sought a different approach to insurance. We are on a mission to be the ‘most inspiring specialty (re)insurance group in the world’. At the heart of Aventum are our people. Working together in dynamic, service-focused teams, we prioritise our customers in everything we do. Collaboration fuels our success, courage drives our innovation and continuous improvement keeps us ahead in a rapidly evolving industry. Our shared commitment is to revolutionise insurance for the better, one day at a time. We also believe that investing in our people is investing in our future. By empowering people across the Group to develop their careers, advance within the Group, and embrace new challenges, we build an environment where growth and learning never stop. Our competitive benefits package, offered via a flexible benefits platform, reflects this. Beyond core benefits, employees have the freedom to tailor their benefits to meet their individual needs, supporting their unique goals and ambitions. Role Summary The Innovation Delivery Lead will work in close partnership with the Head of Innovation to design, deliver and evaluate experiments within the Aventum Innovation Lab. The role sits at the intersection of business, technology and data, translating real business problems into well-structured, measurable experiments. You will own the end-to-end delivery of innovation experiments, from problem framing and backlog definition through to execution, evaluation and handover. Acting as Scrum Master for the Lab’s engineering and research team, you will ensure disciplined, outcome-focused delivery while maintaining the pace and flexibility required for experimentation. The role also contributes to accelerating the effective adoption of Generative AI across Aventum, supporting both business colleagues and, where appropriate, technology teams in making productive and responsible use of emerging AI-enabled tools. Key Accountabilities Experiment Delivery & Backlog Management - Own, manage and prioritise the Innovation Lab experiment backlog, ensuring user stories are clearly defined, scoped and ready for estimation and delivery. - Translate ambiguous business challenges into clear hypotheses, experiments and user stories. - Define and maintain acceptance criteria and formally accept stories as “done” once criteria are met. Stakeholder Collaboration - Partner with business stakeholders to understand processes, pain points and opportunities, shaping problems worth solving rather than solution-led requests. - Work closely with Product Managers and Technology teams to identify where Innovation Lab experiments can de-risk, accelerate or inform delivery across the wider technology roadmap. - Act as a trusted intermediary between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders. Experiment Design & Evaluation - Define success criteria and establish appropriate ground truth for each experiment, ensuring outputs are objectively measurable. - Ensure experiments are designed to generate clear, actionable learning regardless of outcome. - Produce structured experiment reports capturing objectives, approach, success measures, results and key learnings to support informed handover or closure. Agile Delivery & Ways of Working - Act as Scrum Master for the Innovation Lab, ensuring ceremonies are well-facilitated, time-boxed and outcome-focused. - Apply agile principles pragmatically in a research and experimentation context rather than feature delivery. - Continuously evolve delivery practices within the Lab. Generative AI Enablement - Support and coach business colleagues in the effective use of Generative AI tools (e.g. Copilot and other AI-enabled workflows) to elevate productivity and quality of work. - Where appropriate, collaborate with technology teams to explore and share effective patterns for using AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering workflows, productivity and learning. Innovation Culture & Advocacy - Contribute to internal upskilling initiatives, such as training sessions or Lunch & Learns, as required. - Promote a culture of innovation across Aventum through participation in company-wide innovation initiatives, internal communications and relevant external workshops or conferences. General - Undertake any additional duties reasonably required to support the Innovation function. Role Requirements - Proven experience leading or coordinating distributed agile teams using tools such as Azure DevOps or Jira. - Demonstrable experience working collaboratively across business and technical stakeholders in ambiguous or fast-moving environments. - Experience in a delivery, product, innovation or transformation role with exposure to emerging technologies (e.g. data, AI, automation, cloud). - Strong understanding of agile delivery principles and their practical application. - Minimum of 5 GCSEs (A–C / 9–4) including English and Mathematics. - Insurance qualifications (e.g. CII) desirable but not essential. Desirable / Nice-to-Have Experience - Practical experience applying AI-assisted tools within a software engineering or technical delivery environment. - Credibility and confidence to coach or influence engineering teams on effective use of AI-enabled development tools, focusing on workflow improvement rather than hands-on coding ownership. - Experience acting as a bridge between innovation, product and engineering practices. Skills & Capabilities - Excellent written and verbal communication, with strong relationship-building skills. - Strong analytical and problem-solving capability. - Ability to explain complex technical or analytical concepts in clear, accessible language. - Skilled at facilitating structured requirement-gathering and problem-definition workshops. - Confidence to express ideas, challenge assumptions constructively and engage in meaningful discussion. - Naturally curious, with a strong appetite for learning and experimentation. - Collaborative team player with the ability to work independently and take ownership. Management Duties - No We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are proud to share that 93% of our employees say they can be themselves at work. We aim to hire our industry's finest people because the best people drive the best outcomes. And we forever challenge the status quo because we know there are always ways to improve things. Because together, we're limitless. We value applicants from all backgrounds and foster a culture of inclusivity. We understand the need for flexibility, so work in a hybrid model. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process. FCA Conduct Rules Under the Senior Managers and Certification Regime the FCA and Aventum expects that: 1. You must act with integrity. 2. You must act with due skill, care and diligence. 3. You must be open and cooperative with the FCA, the PRA and other regulators. 4. You must pay due regard to the interests of customers and treat them fairly. 5. You must observe proper standards of market conduct. 6. You must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers.