About Us
Across the FT Group, our people are united by a mission to deliver world-class information, news and services to our global audiences. We’re a digital-first organisation made up of journalists, technologists, product managers, event planners, strategists, commercial and finance experts, marketing and communications specialists – and much more. Our strength is in our employees.
The product org is composed of ~60 people, mostly product managers, customer researchers, product designers and business analysts. We work primarily in London and Sofia, Bulgaria. Our purpose is to create continued innovation in the FT’s digital products and services. We do a lot to deliver great products, but we believe our most important responsibility is working out what is worth building in the first place. We drive the process of product discovery, working with customers and prototypes to identify solutions that answer the needs of our subscribers and our business. We define outcomes with our colleagues, find opportunities with customers, design solutions with customers, and prioritise delivery to maximise our impact.
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace
At the FT, we aim for employees across all regions to have a voice so that diverse perspectives are heard and valued. We believe that a supportive workplace is one where employees feel they can be themselves at work and have the flexibility they need to meet their personal needs. We’ll continue to remove barriers for all, and in particular barriers facing employees from underrepresented groups.
The Role / Position Overview
We have an exciting role for a Product Manager in a newly created team which will take responsibility for the overall operational excellence of services and products on ft.com. You can read more about this new team here.
This new role has hands-on product management responsibility for guiding initiatives that contribute to ensuring ft.com is effectively maintained and optimised as we grow and develop new capabilities.
The team covers areas such as site reliability, performance, accessibility and observability, and will work closely with other FT teams across the breadth of the organisation, meaning the work is always varied.
Key Responsibilities
Prioritise ft.com initiatives, ensuring the team focus on the most valuable work and continually improve our operational excellence
Triage, troubleshoot and delegate incidents, making priority decisions where required
Build and communicate your roadmap, liaising with stakeholders across the organisation
Define, track and analyse success metrics while feeding back outcomes
Manage a complex portfolio of platform capabilities and services delivered by the ft.com team
Contribute industry ‘best practice’ into our approach to operational excellence.
Enable the team to educate and advocate for operational concerns of ft.com to both internal teams and external stakeholders
Work in collaboration with the wider product team to define a product vision for your area that is aligned to the FT.com & Apps strategy
Our technology
Node.js; Heroku; AWS Lambda, Kinesis, and DynamoDB
Elasticsearch; Neo4j; Redis; GraphQL; Postgres
Handlebars; Sass; Webpack; Preact
Fastly and VCL
Github; CircleCI; Sentry
Graphite; Grafana; Splunk
Required Skills / Experience
Solid technical background: this is a primarily technically focused team and you will have either been an engineer or architect or worked in a non-engineering role with very technical teams.
Ability to deliver impact – laser focus execution and able to make hard priority calls based on cost and value.
Excellent verbal communication skills – comfortable communicating technical information to non-technical audiences
Highly analytical with a structured problem-solving approach. Metrics-driven, with previous experience in a culture of data-and fact-based decision-making.
Experience in working with teams in a cross-functional, agile environment.
Developed and proven influencing and negotiation skills with a strong ability to work collaboratively across the organisation
What’s in it for you? Our Benefits
Our benefits vary depending on location, but we are committed to providing best in class perks across all our offices as well as an inclusive environment to develop your career. Examples of our benefits include; generous annual leave allowances, flexible working (including working from home), medical cover, enhanced maternity & paternity packages, subsidised gym memberships and Giving Back opportunities. Full details of our benefits can be found here.
Further Information
The FT are committed to providing an inclusive working environment for all. We are an equal opportunities employer who seeks to recruit and appoint the best talent regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We also promote flexible working and will consider specific requests around flexibility for all roles where it can be accommodated. Please let us know if you require any adjustments as part of the application process or to enable you to attend an interview. If you would like to discuss your requirements, or have any questions, please contact a member of our HR team who will be happy to help.