eLife are now seeking a Product Manager to help drive the execution of our ambitious product roadmap. The Product Manager will work closely with our Senior Product Manager, and our User Experience and Technology teams, to help turn user requirements into actionable user stories and act as a conduit between the Technology team and the rest of the organisation. All of our products are made available as free, open-source software and we collaborate with multiple organisations, either as suppliers or as like-minded partners striving to achieve positive change.
The role involves helping to define product features, evaluate the effectiveness of features after deployment by finding the right metrics, measuring their success or failure, and feeding this information back into the planning process.
You care about creating great products that delight users and make the people that build them feel proud. You have great communication skills and enjoy working with people from different backgrounds at all levels and disciplines in the organisation. You are able to quickly judge the value in a piece of work, and know how to obtain the right data to make informed decisions. Canvassing opinion and helping meet a shared understanding are key to your strengths, and you enjoy facilitating discussions.
Experience and attributes
Experience of working in a UX-driven product environment with a rapidly iterative development process would be a great advantage. An understanding of STM publishing processes including Production, Features and Editorial workflows would also be useful.
Specific responsibilities
The main responsibilities of this role will be to assist our Senior Product Manager in the product management of Continuum (a continuous publication platform), xPub (a next-generation submission and peer review platform for academic articles) and Observer (a business intelligence platform for better data driven decision making).
Specific responsibilities will include:
- Working across teams to find elegant routes to delivering the product roadmap for Continuum, xPub and Observer.
- Helping keep the organisation up-to-date on product issues, direction, timelines and metrics on product health.
- Identifying, triaging and prioritising issues from all teams and users.
- Brainstorming new product ideas, and improvements and iterations to existing products.
- Ensuring the backlog of our three main product areas are always up-to-date, aligned to our mission, and contain the right information.
- Help run and analyse user testing sessions with end users on our products.
- Managing the relationship with a number of eLife’s development partners and collaborators.
- Taking part in regular Technology Team meetings like retrospectives, stand ups and knowledge sharing.
- Monitoring and reporting on the performance of products.
- Keep abreast of new developments in research communication, and contribute to the technology development strategy for eLife.