Senior Product Manager - 12 Month FTC

This position is fully remote/home based. Applications will be accepted from candidates based in the UK. This is a 12 month FTC.

Role Summary PLOS is a nonprofit Open Access publisher with an ambitious mission: to help transform research communication so that science can be shared, understood and used more effectively.

We're

looking for a Senior Product Manager to join our Product team for a 12-month maternity cover contract. It's

an interesting time to join us.

Research publishing is changing rapidly. Researchers' expectations are changing. Technology is creating possibilities that

didn't

exist a few years ago. And at PLOS

we're

rethinking some of the services, systems and assumptions that have shaped scholarly publishing for decades.

That means there are interesting product

problems

to solve - not just features to deliver.

You'll

take responsibility for a product area and work with designers,

engineers

and colleagues across PLOS to understand the problems that matter, work out where we can make the greatest difference and help the team learn its way towards good solutions.

Although this is a fixed-term role, it

isn't

a caretaker role.

You'll

be joining active product teams working on significant problems and will have plenty of opportunity to shape what we do and how we do it.

How we work

We want our product teams to be curious, evidence-led

and comfortable with uncertainty.

We

don't

expect a Product Manager to arrive with all the answers. We do expect them to ask good questions.

You'll

use continuous discovery alongside delivery: spending time with users, looking at data, understanding the wider service,

identifying

assumptions

and finding practical ways to test them.

You'll

help the team break large problems into smaller things we can learn from, rather than waiting until everything is known before we release something.

And

you'll

make the team's thinking visible - explaining what

we're

trying to achieve, what

we've

learned, what

we're

uncertain about and why

we're

making the choices we are.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Product Manager,

you'll:

Understand the problem.

Build a deep understanding of our users, their

needs

and behaviours, as well as the organisational,

operational

and technical context surrounding them.

Shape product direction.

Work out where the greatest opportunities lie within your area and help translate PLOS's

objectives

into clear product outcomes and priorities.

Practise continuous discovery.

Work closely with design, engineering and others to explore problems,

identify

assumptions

and regularly test ideas with users and through data.

Turn uncertainty into learning.

Frame hypotheses, design useful

experiments

and look for the

smallest sensible

way to learn whether

we're

heading in the right direction.

Make

good product

decisions.

Weigh evidence, impact, effort,

risk

and opportunity when deciding what to pursue - and what not to pursue.

Measure whether things are getting better.

Define useful measures of success and use qualitative and quantitative evidence to understand whether our work is having the intended effect.

Work iteratively.

Help the team deliver in small steps, learn from what happens and adapt rather than treating plans as fixed commitments.

Communicate your thinking.

Clearly explain problems, evidence, choices,

trade-offs

and learning to people with

very different

levels of technical and product knowledge.

Create strong feedback loops.

Use conversations, demos,

reviews

and other forums to get useful feedback early rather than presenting finished thinking late.

Work as part of a team.

Create the conditions in which designers, engineers and other specialists can contribute to product decisions rather than treating product management as something the PM does alone.

Look beyond the product interface.

Understand the wider service, including processes,

systems

and teams around it, and recognise when solving a user problem requires changing more than software.

Experience and qualifications

Essential

Degree-level qualification or equivalent professional experience.

At least three years' experience working as a Product Manager in a multidisciplinary digital product team, working closely with disciplines such as design, engineering,

research

and delivery.

Experience using product discovery alongside delivery - for example, user research, data,

experimentation

and hypothesis testing - to understand problems and inform what a team should do next.

Experience working with significant uncertainty or ambiguity:

identifying

what is known, what is assumed and what needs to be learned before making larger commitments.

Experience taking complex problems and helping a team turn them into clear priorities,

outcomes

and practical next steps.

Experience making product decisions using a combination of user evidence, data, organisational goals, technical

constraints

and product judgement.

Experience communicating product thinking clearly to a wide range of people, including explaining evidence, uncertainty, trade-offs and why particular decisions have been made.

Experience working collaboratively with people outside the immediate product team, particularly where

different groups

have

different needs,

incentives

or perspectives.

Particularly useful

We'd

be especially interested in candi