Senior Product Manager

This maternity cover role will continue the work of our Senior Product Manager, who has lead on defining and embedding the governance framework, approaches, processes, and cultural change needed to allow us to fully embed our Product-first approach into the Kaplan International Pathways business. This includes managing the alignment of workstreams, ceremonies, deliverables and team dependencies to ensure that Digital Product function delivers effectively.

At a day-to-day level, you will be supporting and stewarding product owners across a number of customer journeys to remain focussed on bringing strategic, customer centric thinking to the digital services and products that we deliver for Kaplan International Pathways.

Technology is at the heart of what we do, as the digital expectations of our customers continue to increase. Our Digital Product team is directly focused on meeting that challenge through working to understand the needs of the customers and ensure the creation strong, value driven experiences throughout all of our journeys. The team also provides the technology that enables our commercial teams to provide the class leading service and responsiveness that Kaplan International

Pathways is highly recognised for.

Your approach will align with our mission of getting to the core of the needs of our customers, discovering new opportunities for the organisation, creating capabilities that drive amazing experiences and meeting strategic business goals.

You will of course work closely with senior department leaders to get under the skin of their core goals, create an aligned set of measurable strategic objectives, and collaborate on innovative solutions that meet the needs of customers and drive key business outcomes. Delivering a strong user experience will be at the heart of your focus, as will be holistic thinking and service design. The ownership of the product strategy and overall roadmap for your customer journey area will sit with you as you work with our teams and partners to translate product vision and strategy into tangible deliverables.

You will also work closely with the Delivery Management (Projects & Programmes), and Technical teams and partners to ensure that the roadmap comes to fruition and the defined business outcomes are achieved, as accountability for budget and delivery within the customer journey will ultimately sit with you.

You will be working across a talented Digital Product team consisting of other Product Managers, Product Owners, Product Design and UX specialists, and there will be opportunities to shape how this team grows and operates.

Most importantly, you’ll be passionate about your practice, data driven, pragmatic, have a high degree of customer and stakeholder empathy, be focused on unlocking early value and firmly believe in creating fantastic digital experiences. Most of all you’ll be a team player who brings others on the journey.

If this sounds like an opportunity you would like to get your teeth into, please apply.

We’ll be asking you to…

Develop close relationships with stakeholders across the business – from Sales, Marketing and Admissions, through to teams in our colleges
Develop and implement a product-first, customer centric culture, focused on research, experimentation and continuous optimisation
Work with business teams to create product vision and strategy in their areas, using creative approaches such as canvases and mapping techniques, along with identification of key metrics or OKRs.
Be data and metric focused – always looking for new ways to better understand our customers, and ensuring that deliverables are measurable with a clear understanding of ‘what good looks like’
Lead ideation workshops with the business to develop new ideas, with the ability to challenge the business to consider different approaches where necessary
Take a pragmatic, evidence-based approach in your strategy – encouraging approaches that adopt rapid iteration, and aren’t afraid to fail fast
Work closely with Product Design/UX and Marketing design teams to create and evolve approaches and strategies for usability and consistency of experience
Champion a data driven approach, using analytics, customer research and competitors to inform decision making for yourself and your stakeholders
Own and develop roadmaps, working regularly with stakeholders to ensure roadmaps and backlog priorities are aligned to key goals and outcomes
Work directly with Business Analysts and Product Owners to deliver against product strategy and roadmaps
Be seen as an agent for change – focused on finding opportunities to transform processes and approaches to be more digitally aligned rather than recreating what may already exist
Be a highly organised self-starter, who can take ownership of a problem, grow relationships quickly, and is comfortable working in environments that may not be familiar with product management approaches
Provide Leadership, Coaching and Line Management as required to others in the Product Management team
Contribute to the overall Product Management practice – focusing on continuously innovating on tools, approaches and practices to ensure strong Product Management outcomes