Senior Product Manager, Apps

The Times and The Sunday Times are looking for an an exceptional and results-driven product manager with strong business, analytical, collaborative and problem-solving skills to join our world-class team and lead the development of our flagship mobile products.

With responsibility for more than 100,000 loyal active daily users, the Mobile Product Manager will lead the development of the tablet and smartphone apps, and be responsible for increasing engagement, as well as contributing to and leading acquisition, conversion, retention and other revenue-driving initiatives. This highly collaborative and visible role will work across the organisation, with daily exposure to both senior leadership and customers. It goes without saying that the role requires you to be passionate, informed and opinionated about media and digital products.

This is an exciting opportunity for a candidate who wants to help bring the kind of SaaS techniques employed by Netflix and Spotify into the leading edge of news, who will thrive in a dynamic workplace, and who loves getting things done.

This role requires significant creative and technical leadership and has a broad remit to develop compelling products with the goals of:

  • Increasing the amount of time our customers spend reading journalism in the apps
  • Iterating deliberately on existing features and launching entire new feature sets
  • Assessing new and complementary products and business models

The candidate for this role will:

  • Show a deep understanding of subscription models, news media and the mobile space
  • Work closely with the women and men who lead our engineering, editorial, project management, marketing, UX, and other teams
  • Be obsessed with creating the best user experiences for our customers by seeking feedback from a variety of sources including data, customer interviews and social media
  • Be equally obsessed with systematic subscriber growth across a variety of metrics, including acquisition, conversion, engagement and revenue
  • Think creatively about how to generate growth and delight users
  • Balance a shifting set of problems, making good decisions about the right problems to solve in the right order
  • Communicate clearly, pre-emptively, and often – both up, down and across the organisation
  • Remain focused and disciplined, able to combine the tactical with the strategic, and balance the tiny details with the big picture
  • Be comfortable talking with engineers, journalists, designers, users, customer service, finance, and the executive team
  • Make speaking with customers a vital part of their weekly activities
  • Delight in taking responsibility for their products
  • Take a leadership role in a cross-disciplinary team

The candidate will play a key role in our rapidly growing team. Our managers are expected to be autonomous, accountable, and highly communicative. We expect our managers to build the products they want to use; and to use those products in the same ways that our users do.

Basic Qualifications

  • You will have outstanding communication skills
  • You will make consistently sound, rational, and defensible decisions, having synthesised a broad range of inputs
  • You will be obsessed by creating customer value
  • BA/BS/MBA preferred
  • 5+ years experience in demonstrably successful consumer product management
  • 2+ years experience in mobile and SaaS / subscription businesses

This position will be based in our new, Renzo Piano-designed offices in London Bridge. It will report directly to the Group Head of Product for The Times and The Sunday Times.

Apply for the position with a one-page CV and no more than two pages in a covering letter describing the three things you would do to improve the tablet and smartphone apps (and why) by the end of September 2017.

Send an email with a single, three-page PDF attachment to Peter dot Collingridge at news dot co dot uk with the subject line “Mobile Apps Product Manager”