Job Purpose

As a Product Manager you will be passionate about building products that customers love, managing the product management lifecycle from design and build through to launch and maintenance!

We act as the ‘voice of the customer’ at the intersection of product design, technology and business, coming up with innovative ideas to tackle customer problems and translating customer needs into a product strategy, vision, roadmap and backlog. You will be prioritising work to improve customer and business value capturing customer and partner feedback frequently to improve product backlog items. Working as an equal partner alongside our Engineering and Technical Programme Delivery team members you will measure and drive the success of the product, ensuring solutions are valuable, viable, usable, and feasible for the customer.

You will be defining and supervising success measures, balancing short term goals with longer term objectives and make data driven decisions on whether to adjust, refine or change!

As a Product Manager, you will demonstrate solid knowledge of the business and the customer needs, analysing market and driven conditions, influencing a product vision that differentiates and delivers outstanding value based on customer demands.

It is important that we develop strong working relationships with other Product Managers to collaborate on cross-product team priorities and support the continuous maturity of the Product Management Community

You will be playing a significant role in redefining our store operation as part of our Intelligent Store strategy. We are supporting ‘Connected Colleagues’ ensuring that they can communicate easily and quickly within the store environment and know what to do, when to do it and how by delivering solutions to guide colleagues on operational tasks.

The best Product Managers are innovators, obsessed with delivering commercial value, providing thought leadership - generating ideas that inspire and influence others. Being creative and persistent, constantly evangelising, building trust, problem solving, and a great communicator resulting in delivering the most value for the business.

Key Accountabilities and Responsibilities

The Product Manager will shape the product vision to drive business outcomes, balancing priorities influenced by customer needs, product health and industry trends. The mission is to collaborate closely with many subject areas across the business to design and deliver desirable resilient solutions to the market. More specifically, the role is the embodiment of 'All in for the customer' with key responsibilities as follows:

Management of product(s) with a high level of autonomy that leads to the delivery of significant measurable value

Creation and clear communication of the strategic vision of the product with defined OKRs

Collaborate closely with partners aligning business, product and technical priorities to set the product direction, promote the product roadmap and continually improve.

Demonstrate a good understanding of user experience (UX) design and research methods

Demonstrate a good level of technical understanding within your product and understand how your product interacts with all areas of the business

Manage the backlog and contribute to any overall prioritisation process

Create business cases or lean canvas as required that include market analysis, costs and business/user benefit.

Ensures Product measures of success are defined, supervised and communicated

Apply lean practices while delivering value through iterative development i.e. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Support the teams to successfully adopt DevOps, supporting in the triage and resolution of major incidents where required and collaborating with Engineering and Technical Programme Management to ensure operational success.

Drive launch readiness collaborating closely with all parties to ensure adoption

Pro-actively identifies and applies insight from customer research, data analytics, market and competitor analysis to ensure M&S is best in class.

Uses and generates high value from product optimisation, experimentation techniques and user science tools to validate ideas and influence the products.

Operates as a mentor and coach to Associate Product Managers and actively contributes to the wider Product culture acting as a Product evangelist to build awareness and understanding

Line Manager to XX ensuring that the functions of these positions are properly and effectively being implemented, encouraging collaborate 360 feedback interactions from the community, partners & team

Key experience

Essential

Experience in product management, demonstrating successful development and delivery of product strategies - roadmaps through to product launch and optimisation.

Experience and passion for the relevant product area and a deep understanding of the customer

Experience of running successful Product delivery in an Agile software environment to deliver customer-led outcomes.

Demonstrated ability to engage with cross functional teams in a constructive and collaborative relationship

Understanding of Product Health and performance through key SLA’s e.g. Platform Availability, Usage Metrics, Performance Metrics and Scale metrics

Product management techniques and methods, such as facilitating discovery and ideation workshops

Strong problem solving skills, using sound judgement to assess risks, and to lay out your argument in a well-structured, data-informed, narrative.

Solid understanding in the use of tools & techniques for backlog prioritisation and basic knowledge and experience of agile software development

Financial foresight to demonstrate the products value

Knowledge of collaboration technology including Microsoft Teams.

Understanding and experience in working with or in a retail environment or equivalent.

Desirable

Domain specific expertise

Experience of the Retail sector

Good knowledge of Agile Product Management tools e.g. Jira & Jira Align

Bachelor’s degree

Experience with task management solutions or work force management.

Good knowledge of the communication and collaboration market and able to recommend and work with suppliers to deliver on the product roadmap.

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That’s why we’re revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. There’s never been a better time to be part of our team. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact. We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process, and we are happy to talk smart/flexible working.  We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process. If you consider yourself to have a disability or learning difficulty which means you are unable to complete the application process online, please get in touch either by phone on 0345 300 3725 or by email recruitment.online@marksandspencer.com so we can make alternative arrangements for you.

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