Senior Product Manager

Role Summary

How We Work

• Product teams should be curious, evidence-led and comfortable with uncertainty.
• Use continuous discovery alongside delivery: spending time with users, looking at data, identifying assumptions and testing them.
• Help the team break large problems into smaller things to learn from rather than waiting until everything is known.
• Make the team's thinking visible by explaining what we're trying to achieve, what we've learned and why we're making choices.

Responsibilities

• Understand the problem by building a deep understanding of users, their needs and behaviours and the surrounding context.
• Shape product direction by working out where the greatest opportunities lie and translating objectives into clear product outcomes and priorities.
• Practise continuous discovery with design, engineering and others to explore problems, identify assumptions and test ideas.
• Turn uncertainty into learning by framing hypotheses, designing experiments and finding the smallest sensible way to learn.
• Make good product decisions weighing evidence, impact, effort, risk and opportunity.
• Measure whether things are getting better by defining useful measures of success and using qualitative and quantitative evidence.
• Work iteratively by helping the team deliver in small steps, learn and adapt rather than treating plans as fixed commitments.
• Communicate your thinking by clearly explaining problems, evidence, choices, trade-offs and learning.
• Create strong feedback loops using conversations, demos, reviews and other forums to get useful feedback early.
• Work as part of a team, creating conditions for designers, engineers and specialists to contribute to product decisions.
• Look beyond the product interface to understand the wider service, processes, systems and teams around it.

Essential Experience and Qualifications

• Degree-level qualification or equivalent professional experience.
• Using creative problem solving to build software solutions.
• Experience working as a Product Manager in a multidisciplinary digital product team, working closely with design, engineering, research and delivery.
• Experience using product discovery alongside delivery, for example user research, data, experimentation and hypothesis testing.
• Experience working with significant uncertainty or ambiguity: identifying what is known, assumed and what needs to be learned.
• Experience taking complex problems and helping a team turn them into clear priorities, outcomes and practical next steps.
• Experience making product decisions using user evidence, data, organisational goals, technical constraints and product judgement.
• Experience communicating product thinking clearly to a wide range of people, including evidence, uncertainty and trade-offs.
• Experience working collaboratively with people outside the immediate product team where different groups have different needs or perspectives.

Particularly Useful

• Working in an organisation going through significant product, digital or organisational transformation.
• Working in complex service environments where improving the user experience involves changes to technology, operations, policy or organisational processes.
• Helping teams move towards more iterative, outcome-focused or evidence-led ways of working.
• Working in a mission-led, research, publishing, education, scientific or other knowledge-based organisation.
• Experience of scholarly publishing is useful but isn't required.

Compensation

• The base salary range for these positions is (UK) £65,000 - £73,500.
• PLOS also offers a comprehensive benefits package.

Benefits

• Private medical insurance.
• Life assurance.
• Income protection.
• Personal accident insurance.
• Pension with up to 10% employer match.
• 25 days holidays, market competitive Maternity and Paternity leave.
• Birthday and three winter holidays days off.
• 2 days paid time off for volunteering per year.
• Fully remote work environment with stipend on joining for home office.

Working at PLOS

• Join PLOS's Product team and work collaboratively with colleagues across Digital and the wider organisation.
• The role has no direct line-management responsibility.
• The job is fully remote.
• Some flexibility to work across time zones and occasional national or international travel may be required.

About PLOS

Application Notes

• This position is fully remote/home based. Applications will be accepted from candidates based in the UK.