Specialist, Product Management

Role: Product Management

Division: Assessment & Qualifications Delivery

Location: Hellaby (Rotherham)/London/Oxford, UK

Tier: IC20

About UK Assessment & Qualifications: We are responsible for the delivery of nearly 4 million examination results per annum, including A-Level, GCSE, BTEC and T-levels for students in UK and International centres. Our in-house systems process every learner from registration to marking and certification, in a highly regulated business. We currently operate a hybrid estate of predominantly bespoke systems, with an ongoing strategic transformation programme to migrate from on-prem to cloud based, cost effective, scalable, and resilient services.

The Role

Individuals in the Product Management roles are accountable for defining and executing product strategy and the value and viability of what the product team builds , ensuring the product value proposition, and overseeing the viability of products and their features. You will collaborate with Business Analysts, business stakeholders, technical architects, developers, and other technical SMEs to support the transformation programme across the Qualifications and Consumer pillars with UK Assessment & Qualifications.

Within a complex environment, you will represent the interests of the business, informing and supporting tactical and strategic decision-making to ensure proposed solutions align with organisational strategy and vision.

Key Accountabilities

• Develop strong ties with business and technology stakeholders to understand the context of the UK qualifications division to co-create solutions to business problems.

• Ensure customer requirements are captured and documented, maintaining appropriately sized and prioritised backlogs for delivery into a release.

• Work with business and technology colleagues to ensure requirements are in line with strategy, will drive business improvement and are clear and fully understood.

• Work with technology teams to deliver refined requirements to time and budget, and deliver the business benefit outlined in the business case.

• Provide a point of contact between business stakeholders and technology teams – including development progress updates.

• Ensuring demonstrations of progress are provided to stakeholders and user feedback is used to inform continuous improvement.

• Own the product vision, strategy, and roadmap to ensure the team builds valuable, viable solutions.

• Drive efforts to uncover and validate customer problems, write Market Requirements Documents (MRDs) and Product Requirements Documents (PRDs).

• Define and map existing and target business processes. 

• Ensure all analytical artefacts are produced in a consistent and timely manner with a high degree of accuracy and completeness. 

• Consider functional and non-functional requirements for any proposed solution. 

• Work as part of a project team to deliver projects to schedule whilst ensuring deliverables remain in line with strategy and within defined scope. 

• Track and analyze product performance to ensure solutions deliver the intended value.

  
   

What are we looking for?

• Practitioner of delivery using Agile methodologies, with experience of using JIRA an advantage.

• Experience of identifying business problems statements, identifying solutions and automation opportunities

• Experience of business process transformation

• Experience of supporting the development lifecycle for requirements from concept through to testing and usage.

• Skilled in translating requirements into quality user stories with clear and valid acceptance criteria

• Understand the principles of good software development

• Ability to work independently with strong communication, influencing, and leadership skills

• Ability to build partnerships and work in a collaborative environment

• Strategic thinker with the ability to motivate and drive tactical execution 

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, especially in a teamwork environment 

• Highly organised with strong time management including the ability to coordinate multiple efforts and address changes in priorities.

• Strong oral and written communication skills particularly to support cross business and technology dialogue including demonstrating progress and communicating issues to stakeholders

• Self-motivated with a proven ability to motivate and empower others

• Possess the Core skills such as Customer Discovery, Product Development, Data Analysis, Storytelling, Design Thinking, Strategic thinking and technology road map 

• Ability to quickly understand business detail in unfamiliar areas. 

• Ability to create and maintain accurate artefacts that can be clearly understood by a variety of stakeholders. 

• Experience of eliciting and refining stakeholder requirements desirable

Job Location and Hours

We work a 37.5-hour week, with all our team free to flex their day around our core hours, which are Monday to Friday, 10 to 4 GMT/BST.

All our roles are hybrid working; for this role, that means working from the office at least once a week, with up to 3 days a week being required for key periods or projects. Occasional business travel to other Pearson sites may also be required.