Product Manager

at  NorthStandard

Join us to help shape the future of NorthStandard’s digital interactions with our members through our portal, Iris. With a strong focus on business outcomes and opportunities you will be responsible for overseeing the development and lifecycle of Iris enhancements, from conception of opportunities through launch and ongoing optimisation. You will act as the bridge between business objectives and technical execution, ensuring that the product aligns with customer needs, market demands, and organisational goals

SKILLS/QUALIFICATIONS/EXPERIENCE

• Are an agile and product management enthusiast
• Are naturally curious and not afraid to continually question “why?” in seeking the best outcome for your product and the organisation.
• Experience creating strategic product roadmaps.
• Ability to clearly communicate priorities both verbally and written
• Problem solving and advocating for customer solutions
• Demonstrated leadership and problem solving skills
• A strong technical understanding and experience in delivering IT projects
• Effective experience leading complex projects with a mix of technical/non-technical work content
• Have a detailed understanding of agile ways of working (Scrum, Kanban) and have worked as part of a cross-functional team / squad. Have led agile ceremonies (sprint planning, retros, show & tells)
• Confident in building relationships, presenting data and making recommendations to stakeholders across all levels
• Enjoy working as part of cross functional high-trust team, where the combined output is more important than any individual.
• Have working knowledge of Azure DevOps or similar tools (i.e. Jira, Trello).

Key responsibilities will include:

Vision & Influencing

• You’ll be the creator & champion of the product vision. As part of this, you’ll work to inspire & influence your peers around the business towards this vision. You will be a catalyst for cross-functional cohesion, and stakeholder buy-in.
• You’ll create clear, compelling comms about the product, the problem space, and the value proposition. You will work to make it easy to buy in to the direction of the product
• You’ll act as both business and technology evangelist for the product, representing the product team to a range of internal and external stakeholders.
• You’ll play a lead role in the Product Community of practice: Share and develop best practice throughout the Product community on product development techniques and agile delivery.
• You’ll also manage the product roadmap, explaining how the offering will be iterating towards the vision.

Data & landscape

• You will work with others to gather & be fluent in the insights available from users, products and the business. You will use these insights to take an evidence-led approach to decision making.
• You will work with others to monitor the competitive landscape, and act as a guide on superficial competitive/similar product comparison. You will help the organisation understand what true differentiation means (based on true user needs, and established market capabilities).

User Centricity

• You will work with others to gather insights from users, key partners, and service teams in the organisation. You will use these insights to detect underserved needs.
• You will work with others to convert these needs into personas, journeys, problem statements and empathy maps.

Ideation & Validation

• You will create the case for product/problem needs, using available insights.
• You will work with others to run innovation & ideation exercises (e.g. design sprints, Hackathons & co-designing) to respond to those needs.
• You will work with others to user test prototypes; and validate the hypothesised value of ideas.

Definition & Delivery

• You will work to convert validated ideas & opportunities into Epics, features and stories for an Agile development team.
• You will act as PO in that Agile team, providing clarifications, the voice of the user, and prioritising stories for development.
• You will support that team as they work to deliver validated features to market.

Feedback & Monitoring

• You will monitor feature launches & user feedback to determine if releases have delivered the desired outcome, using those insights to feed further ideation/validation/iteration.
• You will identify products & features that no longer solve the user problem effectively and need reinvention.