We’re the CIPD — the professional body for HR and people development. We are the voice of a worldwide community of more than 150,000 members committed to championing better work and working lives. We’ve been setting the benchmark for excellence in people and organisation development for more than 100 years, helping members build their professional expertise and organisations build their HR and leadership capability.
There has never been a more interesting or important time to join us. We offer a friendly and stimulating culture and a wide range of professional development opportunities, as well as excellent benefits such as 28 days’ holiday, free two-course lunch and flexible working hours.
The Role
This role sits at the intersection of technology, business and design – balancing the problems and needs of the customer with business interests and technical viability; delivering both customer and business value. You will be responsible for discovering, developing and delivering the what and the why of the product, and jointly responsible (with the Project Manager and dev teams) for the how and the when.
What You’ll Be Doing
Guiding the success of the following CIPD product – the new Learning and Professional Development platform, including the eCommerce solution for CIPD Training. You will lead activities responsible for the delivery, and continuous improvement of the product. The role spans many activities from strategic to tactical and provides critical cross-functional leadership.
Maximising the products’ customer value and alignment to and achievement of our business goals.
Working across the business with key stakeholders to create a clear, overarching vision statement that delivers differentiated value based on customer need and provides direction and a decision-making framework for product and content teams.
Managing the product design process – the collaborative generation of desirable, viable and feasible product ideas (to solve based on business and users’ problems/needs) from experts, users and CIPD stakeholders, turning those ideas into business and customer value.
Commissioning customer research and market analysis to understand and solve customers’ problems/need, and deliver customer relevance and value.
Problem solving: investigates and articulates the underlying challenge, questions underlying assumptions and hypotheses and (following research and analysis) reframes the problem into a guiding opportunity statement.
Coordinating the development of the product business case. Accountability: owns the business case going forward, including the product’s success measures (built out of any underlying hypotheses) and ROI.
Translating business strategy, market analysis, technical trends and user needs into product strategy using a product roadmap – a high-level summary of the vision and development direction.
Managing product releases – coordinates teams and activities, manages dependencies. Owns the release plan, including production schedules, communicating it to the team and stakeholders.
Defining features, balancing business requirement and user experience. Prioritises feature set according to strategic goals and customer needs. Maintains and prioritises a data-informed product backlog. Clearly communicates prioritisation decisions (and evidence/data used to make those decisions) to team members and stakeholders.
Writing requirements, user stories and acceptance scenarios/criteria. Ensures development teams have all the necessary information to deliver a desirable product to market.
Ensuring product features are user tested and follow UX and accessibility best practice.
Providing product marketing with information on new features and key differentiators to inform marketing messages and campaigns.
Ensuring our Content teams (and 3rd party content providers) follow content and metadata management, learning pedagogy, and web/UX best practice.
Working closely with our Content teams to ensure content and product features together deliver demonstrable customer value.
Managing all aspects of “in-life” product performance, including customer feedback, requirements, and issues associated with the product – both the platform and the content. Monitors customer feedback (quantitative and qualitative) and manages user-led iterative platform improvement activities; works with Content teams to suggest clear, iterative improvements to the content.
Following a validated learning approach – a continuous build-measure-learn feedback loop to deliver customer value using prototypes, pilots and MVPs where appropriate.
Following technology trends to inform ongoing product development.
Contributing to the Customer Experience department strategy, supporting our development and delivery of digitally enabled, customer-centric online solutions.
What You’ll Need To Be Successful
Demonstrable experience of Product Management, ideally in the Learning technology sector.
LMS/VLE technology and student management experience.
Attention to detail and business awareness, project management, organisational and interpersonal skills.
Ability to co-ordinate several streams of work simultaneously and work well as part of a team.
Excellent influencing and stakeholder engagement skills.
Strong analytical, problem solving and strategic thinking skills.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Please note, this advert is due to close on Tuesday 12 November 2019.