Product Manager

Job Description

Audience & Acquisition Product Manager, Subscriptions Platform

About us

News UK is a great company full of talented, dedicated and creative people. We are an organisation that holds journalism at it’s very heart. Our newspapers and digital products include some of the most powerful media brands in the English speaking world: The Times,The Sunday Times and The Sun - reaching 30 million people each week. Despite differences in audience and content our brands are united by a commitment to independent journalism that connects our customers.

The Technology department (where this role sits) is a team with people and product at our heart. Passionate and trusted experts creating industry leading solutions through attracting and developing the best talent. Your success is our success: we put our staff and their careers first., We’re proud of our collaborative, fun culture and flexible working life.

The MAIN platform (monetisation, access and identity for News) comprises a set of technical products and services, both built in-house or provided by vendors, which are used by News UK’s brands.

Together this set of products and services provides a platform underpinning both internal business applications and customer facing line of digital products. The key areas of operation include identity and access mgt, Ecommerce, subscription management, order fulfilment, billing and payments, product catalogue, offer and entitlement management. The team is also responsible for the contact centre systems.

The role

We are looking for a Product Manager to join us and be responsible for continuing to shape the roadmap for a number of platform services as we evolve our capabilities and collaborate on global subscriptions platform initiatives.

The role will encompass audience and acquisition elements of a subscriptions lifecycle from creating reader identity, segmentation, content access and personalisation through to product catalogue, CRM, billing, payments, and order fulfilment.

About you:

• Have a highly collaborative approach to product development both with business and technical people

• A detail-oriented self-starter, with a positive attitude, capable of staying on track and discovering solutions to problems without supervision

• Real passion for technology and News UK brands

• Excellent communication skills at all levels within the company, and with external customers and third-party partners/suppliers

• Have strong negotiation, organisational and facilitation skills. An excellent presenter with exemplary outcome-based meeting skills

• You’re a compelling storyteller, who enjoys communicating concepts and ideas to engineers, peers, creatives and execs

• Understanding and experience of publishing subscriptions, e-commerce, CRM, web and cloud based technologies and role andBreif design of API first systems

• Experience in Scrum or other agile approaches

• Be able to embrace our values:Passionate-Brave-Curious-Optimistic

What you’ll do:

Product Strategy and Business Engagement

• Work with the Head of Product and key stakeholders to translate the business strategy into a product strategy, set business goals, success metrics and detailed roadmap

• Lead your product team/s to determine iterations, and prioritise the roadmap based on business value

• Provide a clear articulation of the product vision, features and functionality to stakeholders and the wider organisation

• Understand and synthesise needs from market research, consumer insights, analytics and competitive insights, market potential, trends, problems, and opportunities

• Provide updates, submissions and presentations on your product/s to Product and Strategy Council

Customer Value and User Experience

• Lead collaboration with creative, user experience, delivery teams to ensure a unified customer experience

• Effectively communicate product design ideas and concepts

• Lead collaboration with research, design, UX and software development teams to visualise and prototype products and features.

• Ensure user research, analytics and testing are built into the product design and development lifecycle

• Run pilot and beta programs that include metrics to measure success.

Process

• Work hands-on with design and business analysts, development teams and stakeholders to successfully design, build and deploy new products and features in an agile environment

• Participate in planning session, daily stand-ups and retrospectives

• Work closely with development team to clarify requirements or priorities

• Share and collaborate across the business and technology to ensure a holistic approach and alignment of platform and product roadmaps

• Ensure product issues and customers feedback is prioritised and resolved

• Support business analysts to create user stories that convey what you want and to establish and maintain a visible, prioritised backlog.