Full-Time London (South West) Salary: OTE £60,000
  • Pay: Up to £45,000pa plus up to £15,000 bonus based on product commercial success
  • Full time – hybrid (generally max 2 days in office/min 3 days remote p/w)
  • We would potentially consider a four-day week model with pro rata basic salary for a candidate that requires this

Preferred business experience

  • 3+ years’ product management experience within software and / or media
  • B2B experience
  • Experience of data products an advantage but not essential
  • Legal / professional services sector experience an advantage but not essential

Overview

Burlington Media is a small but ambitious media business serving the legal sector. We’re looking for a product manager looking to take the next step in their career and own a brand-new data product, called Unicorn.

Overseeing both commercial and technical development – and as the first product manager in our business – you’ll be shaping both our product and processes from the ground-up. You’ll be responsible for strategy, P&L, roadmap and go-to-market, and for bringing product management best practice into our business.

About the product

We’ve now finished a successful year-long revenue-generating pilot phase, after soft launching in August 2020. It is being sold as a data service for businesses selling services into the legal sector. We are currently prototyping dashboards in MS PowerBI ahead of UI planning for a front end. We are still at an early stage of go-to-market.

We created Unicorn in-house, but now need a dedicated product manager to drive the product and business unit forwards, develop a ‘product’ that users can use; gain new accounts and retain customers.

What do we need a product manager to do?

  • Carry out customer listening with existing clients and prospects to determine what they think of the product/service, what would get them to renew/buy, and how to develop the product in line with customer needs
  • Act as the expert in the room for the product with the commercial team, and conduct sales calls with prospects and help get them ‘over the line’
  • Own the product roadmap, planning and delivering continuous product improvement (from MVP and beyond), across:
    • The data points the service should store, including creating the processes to source and build that data
    • Back-end and front-end improvements
    • Integration with other Burlington Media platforms
  • Manage third parties such as our data verifying/cleansing partner
  • Manage ad hoc contractors (including interns) to gain data and add it to Unicorn
  • Work with internal and external people on development of go-to-market strategy, including:
    • Commercial targets and goals
    • Legal and compliance strategy
    • Marketing and content creation from the data
  • Hold financial and operational responsibility for the product area:
    • Run the P&L
    • understand the commercial goals for the area set by the Senior Leadership Team and work to achieve them
    • Work closely with the sales team on prospect targeting and pipeline
  • Help the wider business understand what you are doing, how and why, and to communicate product development and commercial progress

What we expect you to be able to do/skills we think you will need:

  • Agile working. You will need to develop the product using an Agile methodology, with an awareness that Agile is new to the business. You’ll need to be able to prioritise work, manage resources, deliver an MVP to scope and iterate based on customer insight. You’ll set and measure outcomes so we are clear on what ‘good’ looks like. Skill level – we expect you to be able to do this fluently and have experience in it.
  • Experience of working within constraints. You can identify constraints, can communicate these to stakeholders and work within them. You will also know how to challenge the validity of constraints and be creative in problem-solving. You can ensure standards are being met while avoiding scope-creep. Skill level – we expect you to be able to do this fluently and have experience in it.
  • Financial ownership. You will understand the need for commercial goals for the business unit and your part in achieving them. You will need to create mini business cases/explanations for spending. You should be able to prioritise spending based on return on investment. You will be responsible for the P&L of the product/business unit. Skill level – You will have worked with budgets and business cases, and you will understand commercial goals, but you may not have been responsible for spend or commercial goals.
  • User focus. You will need to be our user researcher and represent users internally. You understand the difference between user needs and the desires of the user. You can champion user research to focus on all users. You can prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so. You can offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used. Skill level – We expect you to be able to do this fluently and have experience in it.
  • Life-cycle perspective. You should be able to manage product phases, and recognise when to move from one stage of a product life cycle to another, making sure you bring the business with you. Skill level – We expect you to have at least been involved in this before and fully understand it.
  • Operational management. You should know how to design operational processes for the running and maintenance of products or services throughout their product life cycle. You can redesign operational processes, amend existing processes, and plan and put into operation the stages of a new product or service development. You can act as the escalation point for operational issues and can fix complex operational issues. You know how to overcome operational constraints to deliver a successful product or service. Skill level – You will have a working understanding of this area and be willing to take on responsibility for it rapidly.
  • Best practice awareness. You know the fundamentals of product management best practice and how to apply tools, terms and concepts in a variety of ways. You can be flexible, consider new ways of working and adapt to change. You are comfortable at introducing others to new concepts and strive to keep yourself abreast of the best ways of working. Skill level – we expect you to have seen this in action and be keen to introduce others to best practice.
  • Strategic ownership. You will need to know how to get buy-in from the business. You can work with scant information and explain it in abstract terms. You can develop a strategy for the product over time. Skill level – We expect you to have been involved in strategy setting before and have an ambition to own strategy for the product in future.

Who will you work with?

  • You will be assisted by the current data lead who has been responsible for the development of the service up to now. You will have a significant amount of their time initially, tapering down to about 0.25FTE of their time over 6-9 months as they are reassigned to other areas of the business (current plans)
    We will review the need for further recruitment at 6 months, 9 months and 12 months after you start
  • We have external partners for website dev, data verification, strategic marketing advice, data protection (Unicorn already has a consultant DPO) and product dev that can be called upon. If you have trusted partners you have worked with in the past, we will consider them
  • You will report directly to one of the co-CEOs

Benefits include:

  • Bike 2 Work scheme
  • Interest free season ticket loan
  • Free eye tests
  • Childcare voucher scheme
  • Free vaccinations