Head of Product & Engineering - Commerce & Payments

Role Overview & Context

The Economist is consolidating Product, Engineering, Delivery, Design and Quality into a single Technology organisation built around durable, cross-functional teams aligned to coherent product and platform domains. Each team has one accountable leader who owns the full lifecycle of its area: understanding the customer and business problem, shaping and prioritising the solution, building, testing, releasing and operating it, and measuring the value it creates.

Commerce & Payments is a critical domain within The Economist's consumer subscription business. It encompasses the technology, products and experiences that enable customers around the world to purchase, manage and renew their subscriptions, and that enable The Economist to price, package and monetise its propositions effectively.

The Head of Product & Engineering, Commerce & Payments will bring together product and engineering ownership of this domain under a single accountable leader. The role will be responsible for evolving the platforms and customer journeys that underpin subscription revenue, while simplifying the underlying technology and enabling greater commercial agility.

The purpose is to create a commerce capability that is reliable, scalable and easy for customers to use, while giving the business greater flexibility to innovate around pricing, packaging, payments and subscription models.

Scope

The role owns the end-to-end commerce and payments ecosystem for The Economist's consumer business, including:

• Checkout and conversion. The customer journeys that take prospective subscribers from intent to purchase, removing friction and improving conversion across markets, devices and payment methods.
• Payments. Payment processing and orchestration, payment methods, gateways and provider integrations, authentication, fraud prevention, payment optimisation and failed-payment recovery.
• Pricing and packaging. The technology and product capabilities that enable The Economist to develop, test and deploy pricing, offers, promotions, bundles and subscription propositions across markets.
• Subscriptions and billing. The platforms and services underpinning subscription creation, recurring billing, renewals, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, refunds and other subscription lifecycle events.
• Revenue retention. Using technology, data and experimentation to reduce involuntary churn, improve payment success and make it easier for customers to maintain and manage their subscriptions.
• Commerce platforms and integrations. The architecture and integrations connecting commerce with identity, entitlement, customer data, finance, marketing, customer service and other parts of The Economist's technology ecosystem.
• Operational resilience and compliance. Ensuring commerce and payment services are secure, reliable and compliant with relevant payment, privacy and regulatory requirements.

The role is accountable for both product judgement and engineering execution across this scope, working closely with Consumer Commercial, Marketing, Finance, Customer, Data, Security and other Product & Engineering teams.

Accountabilities

• Own Commerce & Payments end to end. Set direction and own the roadmap within agreed strategic, financial and capacity guardrails, with accountability for customer outcomes, commercial performance and technical execution.
• Shape our commerce strategy. Develop the capabilities required to support The Economist's evolving subscription model, making it easier to introduce new propositions, pricing models, payment methods and routes to market.
• Lead a multidisciplinary team. Lead Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Product Designers and senior individual contributors, setting high standards and developing capability across disciplines.
• Move the numbers. Own and influence a defined set of commercial and customer KPIs, including checkout conversion, payment acceptance, renewal success, involuntary churn, subscriber retention and revenue.
• Optimise the payment experience. Continually improve how customers pay for and manage their subscriptions, balancing conversion and convenience with security, compliance, reliability and cost.
• Modernise and simplify. Evolve the underlying commerce architecture, reducing unnecessary complexity and technical debt while improving scalability, resilience and speed of change.
• Enable commercial experimentation. Build the capabilities that allow teams to test and launch new pricing, packaging, promotional and subscription propositions quickly and safely.
• Own technical quality and resilience. Set and maintain high architectural, engineering, security and operational standards for systems that sit directly in the revenue path.
• Build strong strategic partnerships. Work closely with Finance, Consumer Commercial, Marketing, Customer, Data and Technology colleagues, as well as payment providers and other strategic partners.
• Operate with a hands-on posture. Stay sufficiently close to the architecture, technology, data and customer experience to make credible trade-offs and maintain the confidence of senior engineers and commercial leaders.

Selection criteria

Essential

• Commerce engineering leadership at scale. Substantial experience leading product and engineering teams responsible for high-volume, customer-facing commerce or payments platforms. Consumer subscription, e-commerce, marketplace, media or other recurring-revenue environments are particularly relevant.
• Payments expertise. Strong understanding of modern payment ecosystems, including payment service providers, gateways, card and alternative payment methods, recurring payments, authentication, payment optimisation and failed-payment recovery.
• Subscription platform experience. Experience with the systems and customer journeys underpinning recurring subscription businesses, including billing, renewals, cancellations and subscription lifecycle management.
• Commercial product leadership. A track record of translating commercial opportunities into product and technology priorities, with demonstrable impact on conversion, retention, revenue or customer lifetime value.
• Engineering credibility. Sufficient technical depth to engage meaningfully in architecture and engineering decisions across distributed systems, APIs, integrations, data flows and high-availability transactional platforms.
• Direct leadership of multidisciplinary teams. Experience leading Engineering Managers and senior engineers alongside Product Managers and other product disciplines within a product-led organisation.
• Complex ecosystem integration. Experience operating across interconnected platforms spanning areas such as commerce, identity, entitlement, CRM, customer data, finance and customer service.
• Data and experimentation. Strong analytical judgement and experience using customer and transaction data, experimentation and performance metrics to prioritise investment and improve commercial outcomes.
• Business case construction. Proven ability to build and defend investment cases that combine technical understanding, customer insight and commercial value.
• Team building. A strong record of hiring and developing senior product and engineering talent and raising the capability of existing teams.

Desirable

• Global payments. Experience supporting international consumer businesses across multiple currencies, payment methods, markets and regulatory environments.
• Payment optimisation. Experience improving authorisation rates, reducing failed payments and involuntary churn, and managing payment-provider performance.
• Pricing technology. Experience building capabilities that enable sophisticated pricing, promotions, bundling and offer management.
• Commerce platforms. Experience with subscription management, billing or payment platforms and their integration into a broader consumer technology ecosystem.
• Risk and compliance. Working knowledge of areas such as PCI DSS, Strong Customer Authentication, fraud prevention, privacy and the regulatory considerations associated with payments.
• Digital subscriptions. Experience within news media, publishing, streaming, SaaS or another scaled recurring-revenue consumer business.
• AI-enabled ways of working. Experience introducing AI tooling into engineering and product workflows and using emerging technology to improve team effectiveness.

Attributes

• Commercially minded. Understands that commerce technology exists to enable customer and business outcomes, not simply to process transactions.
• Customer obsessed. Relentless about removing unnecessary friction from the purchase and subscription experience.
• Technically credible. Comfortable moving from a conversation about conversion and revenue to one about architecture, resilience and payment integrations.
• Data-led. Uses evidence to identify opportunities, make trade-offs and measure whether changes have worked.
• Pragmatic. Knows where complexity is necessary and where it should be removed.
• Influential. Able to align Product, Engineering, Finance, Marketing, Customer and Commercial stakeholders around shared outcomes.
• High ownership. Treats the reliability and performance of The Economist's commerce ecosystem as a direct responsibility.
• Builds strong teams. Raises standards, develops talent and creates an environment in which excellent product and engineering people want to work.

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