Senior Strategy & Ops Manager - New Verticals

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About the role

About us At Trainline, our purpose is to empower greener travel choices, connecting people and places. https://www.thetrainline.com/terms/sustainability-faqs Trainline enables millions of travellers to find and book the best value tickets across carriers, fares, and journey options through our highly rated mobile app, website, and B2B partner channels.  Great journeys start with Trainline 🚄  We’re Europe’s leading independent rail platform, helping millions of travellers find and book the best-value rail and coach journeys across our app, website and partner channels. Our job is to make the green travel choice the best choice. By building a better train travel experience, we help more people choose rail - creating a positive impact for customers, our business and the planet. We’re a team of more than 1,000 Trainliners from over 50 nationalities, working across London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Edinburgh and Madrid. Now is a brilliant time to join us and help shape the future of travel. Introducing the Trainline New Verticals Team 👋 New Verticals is one of Trainline's largest growth bets, building and scaling our Hotels and Car Hire businesses. The team is moving fast: standing up new partnerships, launching new product experiences, and setting the operating model that will grow this into a meaningful part of Trainline over the next few years. We're looking for a Senior Manager to be the strategic and operational backbone of this build, working directly with the Head of New Verticals and cross-functional stakeholders to turn ambition into a disciplined, well-run programme. This is a high-visibility role for someone comfortable structuring a loosely defined problem, bringing a point of view to the table, and combining strong execution with a keen eye for detail. You'll co-create strategy alongside Product, Commercial and Legal leads, working closely with multiple cross-functional teams to keep complex, multi-party launches on track, translate strategy into executable plans, and ensure nothing important falls through the cracks. In this role as the Senior Manager, Strategy & Operations, you will...🚄 · Shape the New Verticals strategy across Hotels and Cars, translating it into structured roadmaps, milestones and success metrics · Bring structured thinking to ambiguous, fast-evolving problems and anticipate risks and dependencies before they become blockers · Own the end-to-end programme across major New Verticals initiatives, including new product launches and feature rollouts · Track dependencies, risks and decisions across cross-functional partners, driving them to resolution · Build and run the governance rhythm for the New Verticals programme, ensuring the right people have the right information at the right time · Own leadership reporting, including performance updates, business reviews and steering committee materials, synthesising complex detail into clear, decision-ready narratives · Act as a trusted connective layer between New Verticals and partners including Legal, Compliance, Finance, Product, Design and Commercial · Build strong relationships with senior stakeholders, influencing without formal authority and getting ahead of cross-team friction We'd love to hear from you if you have...🔍 · Strong programme or project management experience, ideally including complex, multi-stakeholder launches · A structured, analytical approach, comfortable building plans, frameworks and reporting from scratch · Executive presence and communication range, equally credible presenting to a steering committee or debating in a working session · Strong stakeholder management skills, with the credibility to work confidently with and influence senior leaders · A bias to action, spotting what needs to happen and driving it rather than waiting to be told · Comfort with ambiguity, energised by building things from the ground up rather than following an existing playbook · Experience in hotels, travel or the broader t