Product Manager

Who we are
We’re a tight-knit team who all share a common vision that what we’re building will define the future of how everyone shops.

Inside our Shoreditch office (when we can get to it) you’ll find music, food, plants, the occasional dog, inspiration we’ve found from the streets, and a can-do mindset in people who want to make a real difference in the world. On Friday you’ll usually find a few beers open as part of our weekly roundup too.

As part of the giant remote-working experiment that has been 2020, we’ve become a semi-remote team and are transforming our office into a collaborative hub where group-work and problem solving happens, and home as a place where focussed deep-work happens. It’s part of a continual journey of experimentation and learning to discover how we can all do our best work.

We’re excited about what the future of retail holds (hear our CEO talk about this during our keynote at The Next Web), and believe we have an incredible opportunity to make a massive positive impact on the world.

So come join us and see how you can truly impact the lives of millions of people every day.

The Role

We’ve worked well so far without a formal product management role by collaborating closely, focusing on filtering and prioritising potential work. We have developed a shared roadmap, keep participation in Feature Suggestions and Project Management consistent and try hard to question and verify the work that gets carried into sprints. But we want to do better and that is where this new role comes in.

We are really looking for a very rare person, someone who possesses a wide range of product centric skills – feature definition, prototyping, strategic product vision, hypothesis formulation and testing, design chops – and who can take ownership of product as a function at NearSt.

You’ll understand the competitive landscape, understanding what makes NearSt stand out. Your responsibilities will include definition and refinement of product delivery processes, collaborating around delivery roadmaps and providing visibility of product progress alongside work to ensure a clear and executable backlog of work is in place and stakeholder needs are correctly represented and prioritised.

The role is the first product specific one at NearSt reporting to one of the founders.

Qualities of the Product Manager

  • Thrives on working with cross functional, agile product teams to deliver outstanding products and continually improve standards.
  • Values working in a diverse, and open team environment – and actively works to promote this.
  • Actively seeks to be the voice of the customer and champions their cause
  • Views product architecture and design as a shared responsibility and works across teams to deliver a consistent vision.
  • Speaks up with candour and clarity representing product needs
  • Uses a data-driven approach to decision making and problem-solving.
  • Exemplifies a design centric approach
  • Has a good feel for User Experience, without necessarily being a UX Architect by training

Our Product Manager’s responsibilities

  • Defines and refines strategic product direction
  • Works closely with the founders to ensure product direction is aligned to the company vision.
  • Drives the delivery process with clarity on requirements and clear acceptance criteria.
  • Provides wireframes and prototypes into the development pipeline to guide engineering.
  • Manages the product backlog, ensuring correct prioritisation.
  • Works to adapt agile methods to suit the direction of work
  • Creates a clarity of vision around delivery needs, and stands alongside the engineering team in working to commitments
  • Monitors key metrics
  • Works with the NearSt project manager to coordinate cross functional dependencies
  • Own the creative process of generating, developing, and curating new ideas.

Some things they are really good at

  • Collaborating around stakeholder needs in a manner that allows solution options to be developed.
  • Gets to the heart of the opportunity quickly and communicates the need to the delivery team
  • Understanding needs and motivators of our customers and articulating those to drive delivery focus
  • Strong communication and collaboration in providing product direction
  • Strong analytical skills and problem-solving aptitude
  • Forming meaningful hypotheses and defining how to test them
  • Leadership in a growing company situation

Some of the critical things they do

  • Ensures the Jira backlog is well managed
  • Develops wireframes to test out ideas and creates UI designs
  • Maintains contact with the customer community
  • Collaborates with the wider set of business stakeholders to enable fantastic, industry defining work
  • Helps to maintain a balance between building sustainable, high-impact product features and shipping things quickly.
  • Reports to Head of Strategy & Product and works closely with the leadership team to develop our product strategy in line with business objectives

We think a great workplace is filled with all the diversity the world has to offer. This means we make no judgment about the things that make you, you – whether that be gender, religion, sexuality, race. If you’re excited by our mission, we’re excited to meet you.