Senior Product Manager

Full-Time London, England, United Kingdom
public Website


This is a senior position within a dynamic new education startup operating within Macmillan Science and Education. Our product is an online learning platform, targeting emerging markets that offers a blend of self-learning and live one to one tuition.

We are less than 1 year into our journey and we’re looking for a top notch Senior Product Manager who can help us gain traction in our target market and optimize/refine our product offering to achieve our aggressive targets for 2014 and beyond.

Key responsibilities

  • Drive conversion of traffic into paid users by optimising user experience before purchase
  • Drive product strategy and prioritize requirements based on market research, business strategy and customer feedback.
  • Drive innovation- proactively identify and implement new ideas/technologies, which could substantially improve customer experience and/or create differentiation
  • Improve customer retention by understanding customer usage patterns. Help sales align retention strategies to key reasons for customer attrition.
  • Manage stakeholders through effective communication and by maintaining high-level plans
  • Lead current team of Product Manager/s and developers while taking individual responsibility for driving strategic initiatives
  • Embed newly established processes to allow rapid scale up e.g., timely recruitment of additional resources, continuous deployment, backlog sizing and prioritisation
  • Be the customer champion for the product.
  • Lead web analytics to review engagement metrics and monitor the popularity of specific features/functionality available within the product. Establish business metrics to inform product improvements and optimization, or new product development. Monitor competitive trends and market developments where appropriate.
  • In collaboration with colleagues, design the product’s promotional strategy to ensure a successful product launch within 12 months and effective promotion post-launch, including creation of informative content as needed
  • Use agile methodologies to rapidly iterate on product
  • Serve as the key spokesperson for the products being managed, clearly and convincingly communicating the aims of the products to customers and business alike.
  • Collaborate with colleagues within Digital Education and Macmillan Publishers Ltd to ensure initiatives represent business needs.
  • Work closely with users to ensure product functionality meets their expectations and understand where opportunities exist for product enhancement to retain the audience.
  • Be able to manage the product internationally working with international teams remotely.
  • Other tasks as the company may assign from time to time.
Key relationships:
  • Managing Director- EnglishUp
  • Stakeholders across EnglishUp as well as other businesses within Digital Education and wider Macmillan and Holtzbrinck group
  • Wider market – key competitors and customers alike
Qualifications:
  • Educated to degree level; ideally from a technical or business related subject with some exposure to or an interest in online businesses.
Skills/knowledge/ Experience:
  • Proven track record of product management in an e-commerce set up- successfully managing online product development and conversion of traffic into paid users
  • Experience leading teams, balancing needs across stakeholders and in a complex business environment.
  • Experience of agile technical development using Scrum methodologies.
  • Experience in specifying business and customer requirements to technical teams, and working with tech teams to deliver user centric solutions.
  • Experience with web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, Flash, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, relational databases, XML databases, RSS, streaming media, etc.
  • Experience of working with designers
  • Experience of working with Gamification would also be an added bonus.
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of colleagues and stakeholders.
  • Solid understanding of website development best practices including interface design, information architecture and software development and deployment.
  • Strong analytic skills and the ability to balance intuition with data in making decisions.
  • Ability to develop and refine a compelling product vision with attention to detail.
  • Highly organized.
  • Willingness, flexibility, creativity, and energy in taking initiative and assuming responsibility.


Need to be capable of
1. Technical Capability 

Uses technical / job knowledge and experience to meet and exceed job requirements / customer expectations.  Efficiently manages workload and projects within set timelines and to agreed budget, achieving set objectives. 

3. Relationship Building/ Teamwork (incorporating

Communication, Influencing & Collaboration)Builds effective relationships through positive communication that motivates and influences others.A valued team member actively involved in achieving team objectives.  Works cooperatively and flexibly with other members of the team. 

5. Managing Complexity incorporating decision making, planning and organisation and resilience

Is able to work effectively in a highly complex, diverse, changing environment.  Changes own behaviour in order to deal with changing circumstances.  Maintains a high level of performance under conditions of increased pressure, competition and adversity. 

6. Innovation & Change

Embraces creativity, innovation and is open to new ideas. Innovates to improve current working practices / products / technologies to provide business opportunities and results.  Proactively pursues opportunities to drive change that add value to the business. 

7. Problem Solving

Takes initiative to identify current and potential problems and determines the best solution. . Involves and/or manages the people and resources required.  Identifies the cause of problems and key issues through investigation; identifies effective, logical and practical solutions.  Makes decisions in a timely manner and evaluates their effectiveness..