[Hiring] Client Lead @Storyteller

Role Description

This role leads the team and operating system behind one of our largest and most important client relationships: a globally recognised organisation in major US sport.

• The work is high-volume and unusually broad, spanning content and publishing operations, design delivery, analytics and analysis, client projects, product and engineering coordination, releases, integrations, live-event readiness, and a growing set of AI-enabled services.
• We need one strong operational generalist who can see the whole picture, lead the people doing the work, and ensure priorities become completed outcomes.
• This is an operational and people-leadership role, not primarily a product-management, sales, or account-director position.

What You Will Own

• Lead and develop the multidisciplinary team delivering work for the account.
• Maintain one clear operating picture across priorities, owners, deadlines, dependencies, risks, and decisions.
• Set the team's workload and standards, inspect delivery, and intervene early when quality, pace, or performance slips.
• Run a high volume of work across content, publishing, design, analytics, client projects, releases, integrations, and AI-enabled services.
• Turn unclear requests into a practical plan: the outcome, scope, owner, next action, dependency, deadline, and decision required.
• Use operating, audience, and delivery data to diagnose problems and make decisions, not simply report activity.
• Work closely with design, content, product, engineering, support, and client leaders without pretending to replace their specialist judgement.
• Help functional leaders manage priorities and handoffs, provide operational cover when they are unavailable, and prevent one account from consuming all of their capacity.
• Lead large, ambiguous operational projects, including audits and migrations, while keeping live delivery moving.
• Improve the operating system itself, including simplifying fragmented tracking and building useful review rhythms, automations, and controls.
• Recognise when a growing area needs clearer ownership, a different process, or a specialist hire; define the need, help hire the right person, and make the resulting capability work.
• Prepare concise, accurate client updates and lead day-to-day delivery conversations, including incidents and difficult news.
• Make sensible day-to-day decisions independently and escalate only the decisions that genuinely need senior or specialist input.

What Good Looks Like

• The team knows what matters, what they own, when it is due, and what good looks like.
• Material work has a current owner, status, next action, and decision path.
• Missed commitments and quality problems trigger early intervention rather than late surprises.
• Content and design work has active capacity, priority, and handoff management.
• Large projects are broken into workable phases with clear leadership and follow-through.
• Client updates are timely, candid, and connected to real delivery state.
• Repeated operational pain becomes a better process, tool, automation, or ownership model.
• AI is used to improve speed, analysis, quality, and repeatability, with important outputs checked and owned by the team.
• Senior leaders can set direction and inspect outcomes without running the account's daily work.

What We Are Looking For

• High agency: you create forward motion without waiting for perfect instructions.
• Strong judgement: you can decide what matters now, what stops, what waits, what needs more evidence, and what needs escalation.
• Direct people leadership: you have set standards, allocated work, coached people, handled performance problems, and remained accountable for the team's output.
• Operational grip: you can run several different workstreams at once without losing the detail or drowning the team in process.
• Numeracy and analytical ability: you can interrogate imperfect data, find the signal, and turn it into a decision.
• Clear communication: you can explain complex work simply to team members, specialists, and senior client stakeholders.
• Cross-functional range: you are comfortable working across content, design, analytics, projects, product, engineering, and service delivery.
• Systems thinking: you improve the mechanism behind the work rather than relying on repeated manual effort or individual heroics.
• Practical AI fluency: you use AI and agents to improve real operating loops, validate the output, and drive adoption.
• Pace and resilience: you can stay calm, make decisions, and reorganise the work when priorities change quickly.
• Attention to detail: you notice the small errors, weak handoffs, and missing ownership that become larger problems later.
• Genuine interest in basketball and sport: you understand how live games, tentpoles, player news, and the shape of a season change operational priorities.

Helpful Experience

• Relevant experience may come from client operations, delivery leadership, content or publishing operations, programme management, product operations, support operations, media, sport, or another high-volume environment.
• We care more about what you have actually led, decided, and improved than a particular job title.
• Strong candidates will be able to show:
• Responsibility for direct reports and difficult people decisions;
• Ownership of several simultaneous workstreams across different disciplines;
• A consequential decision made from incomplete evidence;
• A process, system, or operating model they materially improved;
• An example of helping specialists or functional leaders deliver better;
• A capability gap they closed through clearer ownership, process change, or hiring;
• Practical AI use that improved a measurable outcome.

What This Role Is Not

• A product manager responsible for designing the client's app or owning its roadmap.
• A conventional account director focused mainly on relationships, renewals, and expansion.
• A creative director replacing the design lead.
• A project coordinator who records actions but does not own outcomes.
• A specialist expected to personally perform every kind of work on the account.

Recruitment Process

• An initial conversation about the role and your relevant evidence.
• A time-boxed practical operational exercise. Sensible AI use is allowed and expected.
• A live discussion of your work, including a changed constraint that requires you to adapt the plan.
• The process is designed to test how you organise complexity, lead people, use evidence, communicate, and make decisions in practice.

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