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#Company & Department Context

The Financial Times (FT) is one of the world’s leading business news and information organisations. We are recognised globally for our authority, integrity and accuracy. We provide a broad range of essential services, including news, comments, data and analysis, to the growing audience of internationally minded business people.

Within our Product and Technology Division, FT Core is the group designing, building, and maintaining FT’s three platforms (Content & Metadata, Data, and Membership) as well as services and products that support both the B2C and B2B businesses of FT.com and other parts of the wider Financial Times business.

Position Summary

As a Product Manager in FT Core you will be responsible for a key portfolio of platform capabilities and services that spans across more than one of our existing platforms and is aimed at improving the discoverability of FT’s award winning content. 

As part of the role, you will talk to customers and internal stakeholders as well as look at the existing data to understand how our customers search for, discover, and engage with FT’s content both for personal and for professional purposes. You will use that knowledge and work with other product managers to understand improvements in our end products that can have measurable impact on the discoverability of our content. Ultimately you will translate that into a roadmap for specific platform capabilities that would need to be built to enable those end product improvements.

As with any Product Manager role at the FT, you will synthesise user research and requirements from a disparate set of stakeholders and customers into clear product goals, and you will work with your colleagues across business analysis, engineering, design, and research to turn these goals into executable plans. 

A major part of your role will be working closely with your colleagues in engineering, design, research, and delivery to validate opportunities for new products and features via discovery to make sure we only build what’s worth building. You will regularly and clearly communicate the team’s progress back to stakeholders, working closely with delivery leads and technical leadership to do so. 

We expect that you are a Product Manager with an understanding of customer-centered design and data driven decision making. In order to be successful in this role you need to have genuine interest in topics like content discoverability, search, recommendations, and the data that helps enable them. You need to be able to take initiative and quickly and confidently make decisions when it’s called for. In your day-to-day job, you should be able to communicate with engineers, designers, and other product managers, and effectively translate the requirements between them to ensure everyone is on the same page. You will use your exceptional communication skills (both written and verbal) to develop healthy relationships with people from diverse backgrounds and fields.

Main Duties and Responsibilities

In this role you will…..

• Be the voice of the customer, developing an in depth understanding of the way they interact with our products/services

• Define, track and analyse success metrics while feeding back outcomes into the product process

• Work in collaboration with the Director of Product and other product managers to define a product vision for your portfolio that is aligned to the company strategy

• Lead the prioritisation of the product backlog in your remit, in line with the strategy

• Act as a product owner, working closely with the technology team to deliver the agreed roadmap

• Collaborate with stakeholders around the business

• Take decisions based on data 

• Build and communicate your product roadmaps to stakeholders

• Inform yourself and your team of market development

• Contribute industry ‘best practice’ into the product development process. 

Person Specification

You must be execution focussed and results driven, easily converse with colleagues at all levels of the organisation, actively engage in technical discussions, and understand high level technical architecture. 

Essential

• At least two years of product management experience with a track record of managing successful products

• Experience within a content business and with content discoverability

• Entrepreneurial mindset and ability to orient yourself and others in a dynamic and fast-paced environment

• Knowledge of the entire product lifecycle from insights/analysis, roadmap development, UX, UI and Data driven approaches

• Proven record of delivering products through collaboration with stakeholders and technical teams

• Have a proven track record of defining and improving key business metrics 

• Experience with producing strong business requirements and justifications

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

• Developed and proven influencing and negotiation skills

• Confident leading meetings and workshops

• Experience working in an Agile environment including as a product owner

Desirable

• Knowledge of the media industry and of how large media companies operate

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