The Economist is the leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs. We deliver our information through a range of formats, from newspapers and magazines to Apple TV/OTT apps and VR Experiences. What ties us together is the objectivity of our opinion, the originality of our insight and our advocacy of economic and political freedom around the world.
With a growing global circulation and a reputation for insightful analysis and opinion on every aspect of world events, The Economist is one of the most widely recognised and well-read current affairs publications.
The Economist’s Publisher Team was created in April to streamline the commercial decision making process and make sure all needs are reviewed and prioritised based on business impact. As a result, everyone has access to world-class expertise in strategy, marketing, finance, analytics and product delivery, as do our clients. Our aim is to support readership growth, which underpins all our revenue streams and our future.
Do you care about building the right thing more than building the thing right? Do you care about solving problems for users more than using the latest technologies or following the latest trends? Do you want to serve a clear business strategy by solving those problems?
If so you might be a good fit for The Economist’s product management team.
A strategic, inspirational and adaptable product manager is wanted that will report directly to the Head of Digital Innovation. You will need to set and execute a clear product strategy for your product based on the needs of the business, while meeting the needs of its end users. You will need to evangelise that strategy throughout the organisation.
You will need to communicate with and respond to the needs of stakeholders in commercial, editorial and technology, without losing focus of your product strategy.
You should be able to form hypotheses about what will benefit the business and the users based on the knowledge and ideas of yourself, the team and the wider stakeholders. You will use the results of data analytics and qualitative user research to test those hypotheses, revising or dropping them as the evidence suggests.
In this role you will be expected to:
- Develop a product vision that meets the needs of the business while solving problems for users
- Evangelise that product vision to the technical team, immediate stakeholders and organisational executives
- Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders with a firm but fair attitude
- Own the product roadmap, ensuring it balances short terms needs with strategic vision
To succeed in this role you must demonstrate:
- Excellence in product management, ideally with a strategic / business analysis approach
- Must be comfortable with ambiguity and understand that they are there to help define the way forward / what success looks like and communicate it
- Able to understand and prioritise technical debt / tactical work and communicate why this is important to deliver to business stakeholders.
- Demonstrable experience working with cross-functional development teams
- Data driven – uses data and metrics to set experiments, prioritise and measure success
- Ability to prioritise the backlog and clearly articulate acceptance criteria
- Excellent stakeholder management skills, sometimes demanding with conflicting requirements and priorities (includes protecting the team from outside influences)
- Actively engages with the wider product community / understands & contributes to ongoing community
Key Competencies
- Pragmatist, understands how to deliver on their vision incrementally/strategically.
- Ability to think at macro and micro levels
- Articulate and clear communicator, be able to translate between engineering and business stakeholders
- Commercially minded, have a deep understanding what drives our business