Lead Program Manager

Role Purpose

Neko is expanding and opening new clinics. Every launch needs operations, engineering, clinical, regulatory, people, marketing, finance, legal and many more workstreams to move together. This role will play a critical role in any given launch landing: you hold dates and quality across teams you don't manage, make calls with incomplete context, and say early when something will not land, rather than reporting it late.

You'll work alongside the Program Management Lead in our PMO, a central team of senior program managers who run the company's most complex programs. The role has two halves. You run the programs that take Neko into new markets, from due diligence outputs through launch day to the first 90 days. You also help build the foundations that make every program at Neko run better: the standards, tools and habits of the PMO itself. The two feed each other. Every launch should leave the next one faster and cleaner, and every foundation should be proven on a real launch before it is rolled out.

Marketing is a big part of making a launch land in a new country, so you'll spend real time with the marketing, comms, social, growth and demand teams. Expect regular travel to launch markets and clinic sites, especially around launch windows.

What You'll Deliver in the First 6–12 Months

• Run a new-market launch end to end, from the output of due diligence to launch day and the first 30, 60 and 90 days after it (Member-first, always)

• Turn due diligence findings into one integrated execution plan with named owners, dependencies and a critical path, and keep every function aligned to it

• Run launch readiness gates with real criteria, and call a no-go when the evidence says so (Optimistic Truth Seeking)

• Set up post-launch monitoring against agreed targets, hand over cleanly to business as usual, and write what each launch teaches into the repeatable launch playbook (Impact, not activity)

• Help design and roll out program standards, templates and routines that any team can pick up without us in the room, with one accurate, current record of every program, captured by the people doing the work

• Find where the company loses time to coordination, rework or unclear ownership, and drive the fix, including a view on what we should stop doing (Impact, not activity)

• Give sponsors and leadership a view of status, dependencies and risks they can read in minutes
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• Substantial experience running complex multi-country or multi-site programs with many parallel tracks and no single obvious owner, such as market entries, site openings, or retail or clinic roll-outs

• A track record you can evidence: you can walk us through a launch or program you took end to end, what you decided, what shipped and what measurably changed, and separate what you did from what your team did

• Experience turning ambiguous discovery or due diligence findings into a structured, dependency-aware execution plan

• Strong stakeholder management across business and technical functions, up to executive level

• You make judgment calls with incomplete context and own the outcome afterwards

• You have introduced ways of working that teams actually kept using, because you put adoption ahead of sophistication

• You use AI in your own program management work, not as a side experiment, for example to draft status updates and flag slipped dates, and you can explain where it helps and where it doesn't

• Able to work from our Stockholm or London office, with regular travel to launch markets and clinic sites in the UK, the US and elsewhere
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Technical program management experience, or experience working with software or hardware teams

• Healthcare, medical devices or another regulated environment

• Marketing program management

• International expansion, or clinic or site operations

• Building a PMO or program function from near zero

• Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps and Airtable, or with AI tools such as Claude, in program management work
  

Organization and Way of Working

Your week has a steady rhythm: a weekly check-in for each active launch, a fortnightly review across launches so overlapping markets don't compete for the same people, executive reporting to sponsors, and office hours for teams adopting PMO tools and standards. At times you'll be tagged in to program manage part of the planning for a team that is stretched or a launch workstream that is a high priority. At Neko each program has one DRI, who makes the call.