The Release Manager plays a critical role in ensuring that new features and product releases reach customers in a consistent, high-quality, and well-coordinated way. This is a high impact role and sits at the intersection of the Nourish R&D and GTM teams.

The Release Manager is the connective tissue between internal release readiness and the customer experience of receiving a release. They are responsible for the standards, coordination, and communication that determine how a release lands, and for ensuring that every function with a stake in that outcome is aligned, informed, and prepared.

Key Responsibilities

• Release Quality & Customer Readiness

• Define and own release readiness criteria, ensuring all releases meet quality and customer experience standards before reaching customers.

• Establish and enforce controls around feature flagging, customer segmentation, and communications accuracy, preventing incidents such as features being enabled for customers contrary to communicated expectations.

• Partner with Product and Engineering to ensure quality gates are embedded into the release lifecycle, with clear sign-off processes before go-live.

• Champion the customer perspective throughout the release process, ensuring releases are safe, coherent, and well-communicated from the customer’s point of view.

• Beta & Early Adopter Program (EAP) Management

• Own end-to-end management of Beta and Early Adopter Programs, including customer selection, onboarding, feedback collection, and synthesis.

• Work closely with Product Managers to translate beta insights into release decisions and ensure learnings are fed back into the product roadmap.

• Act as the primary point of contact for beta customers during the programme, managing expectations and ensuring a high-quality experience.

• Define the criteria for graduating features from beta to general availability, in alignment with Product and Customer Success.

• GTM Coordination & Sales Enablement

• Own the release plan and ensure all artifacts sitting closer to R&D, including release notes, internal briefings, rollout plans, and feature documentation are accurate, timely, and accessible to all relevant teams.

• Work in close partnership with Product Marketing, who own sales enablement materials and market-facing communications, to ensure a clear and agreed handoff point between the two teams.

• Establish shared templates and handoff processes with Product Marketing to ensure nothing falls between the two teams without a named owner.

• Ensure GTM teams, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing, are fully briefed and equipped ahead of every significant release, with RM and PMM jointly accountable for that readiness.

• Cross-Functional Release Coordination

• Own the release coordination process across Product, Engineering, Implementation, Customer Success, Sales and Marketing, ensuring all functions are engaged at the right time.

• Mandate and manage earlier engagement of the Implementation team in the release lifecycle, establishing a defined trigger point for their involvement to prevent late-stage delays.

• Facilitate release planning ceremonies and cross-functional checkpoints, maintaining momentum and resolving blockers across teams.

• Drive a consistent operating model for how Release Managers and Product Managers work together, including shared cadences, templates, and escalation paths, reducing the current inconsistency experienced by GTM teams and customers.

• Release Communication & Business Alignment

• Maintain comprehensive, real-time release documentation, including plans, timelines, dependencies, and decisions, accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

• Own the communication of release updates across the business, ensuring outputs from planning forums (including the quarterly Product/Engineering offsite) are translated into clear communications for GTM, CS, and Leadership.

• Provide proactive, audience-appropriate communications throughout the release cycle, ensuring no function is caught off guard by a release.

• Release Metrics, Success Criteria & Adoption

• Ensure that measurable success criteria and impact metrics are defined for every significant release, established early in the lifecycle and aligned across Product, Customer Success, and GTM.

• While post-release adoption is owned by Product Managers, the Release Manager plays an active role in ensuring the conditions for adoption success are in place before go-live.

• Track and report on release quality KPIs, including customer impact, feature adoption rates, and incident rates, using data to drive continuous improvement.

• Facilitate retrospectives and post-release reviews, capturing lessons learned and feeding them back into future release planning.

• Process Consistency & Continuous Improvement

• Own and continuously improve the standard release management playbook, ensuring all Release Managers are operating to a consistent process regardless of which Product Manager they are paired with.

• Identify and eliminate inefficiencies in the release lifecycle, working with cross-functional teams to streamline workflows and reduce manual intervention.

• Champion tooling and automation opportunities that improve the reliability, speed, and consistency of releases.

Requirements

• Experience:

• Established experience in a Release Management, Programme Management, or Product Operations role within a SaaS or software environment.

• A strong instinct for the customer experience of a release, with the ability to connect internal process decisions to external customer impact.

• Technical/Functional Alignment:

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex release information for a range of audiences.

• Proven ability to align multiple functions around shared release goals, manage competing priorities, and hold teams to agreed processes.

• A systematic approach to building consistency, comfortable defining playbooks, templates, and operating models and getting teams to adopt them.

• Experience running structured customer beta or early adopter programmes is highly desirable.

• Comfortable working within Agile development environments, with an understanding of the SDLC.

• Sector Interest: A genuine interest in the UK social care sector and how technology can improve interoperability.

• Mindset: A pragmatic, collaborative, and warm approach to problem-solving.

Nourish Benefits

• Annual Leave: 25 days basic + Public Holidays + an extra day for your Birthday.

• Service-Related Leave: 1 extra day for each completed year of service (up to 5 additional days).

• Health & Wellbeing: Private Medical Insurance (including a personal health fund), Health & Wellbeing platform with 24/7 GP access, and an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP).

• Family & Security: Enhanced Maternity Leave, Group Life Assurance, and Pension Contribution.

• Growth & Connection: Regular career reviews, Referral Bonus schemes, and social events throughout the year.

All positions at Nourish are subject to a satisfactory Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, references, and receipt of appropriate Right to Work documents.

Nourish is proud to be an equal opportunities employer and we actively seek and embrace differences in thinking, experience, ethnicity, age, gender, faith, personalities, and styles.