[Hiring] Senior Product Manager @Public Library of Science

Role Description

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

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.

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• Particularly useful: Experience of one or more of the following:
• Working in an organisation going through significant product, digital or organisational transformation.
• Working in complex service environments where improving the user experience involves changes to technology, operations, policy or organisational processes - not simply changing an interface.
• Helping teams move towards more iterative, outcome-focused or evidence-led ways of working.
• Working in a mission-led, research, publishing, education, scientific or other knowledge-based organisation.
• Experience of scholarly publishing is useful but isn't required.

Benefits

• Private medical insurance
• Life assurance
• Income protection
• Personal accident insurance
• Pension with up to 10% employer match
• 25 days holidays, market competitive Maternity and Paternity leave
• Birthday and three winter holidays days off
• 2 days paid time off for volunteering per year
• Fully remote work environment with stipend on joining for home office

Company Description

Building on a strong legacy of pioneering innovation, PLOS continues to be a catalyst in open science, reimagining models to meet open science principles, removing barriers and promoting inclusion in knowledge creation and sharing, and publishing research outputs that enable everyone to learn from, reuse and build upon scientific knowledge.

Our work is supported by a highly skilled global in-house team, partnerships with local scholarly organizations, and the valued contributions of a diverse, international community of scientific researchers.

We’re committed to equal opportunity. We’re working to create a more equitable system of scientific knowledge and understanding. Removing barriers to inclusion and facilitating broad participation of voices is core to our success, inside and out.

Beyond accepting distinct perspectives, we seek and support divergent backgrounds among our staff because we know differences strengthen our teams, our work, and our communities. We strongly encourage applicants of all identities to join us as we work towards a future where science is open to all, for all.