Product Manager

Location: London

Full time, permanent

Salary: £70,000 to £80,000

Tes is an international provider of software-enabled services passionate about using technology to make life easier for schools and teachers. All products and services are built with teachers and schools needs at the core, ensuring they are innovative, trusted education solutions. 

Role overview:

The Product Function at Tes is transforming and expanding, and as a result we’re looking for multiple experienced Product Managers to own parts of our portfolio - front end customer value focused PM roles (as opposed to Technical Back End, API or Data Product roles). This offers an exciting opportunity to innovative the future direction of our products, with a real ability in role to drive change that will make a difference for teachers, students and parents. You will work in a matrix organised in a hybrid scaled agile model, collaborating with all the large functions in Tes (Engineering, Data Function, Transformation, Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance).    

Key Responsibilities:

Discover:

Value Proposition Ownership – Own the vision, strategy and roadmap for either one large product or a collection of smaller related products (your product portfolio will have annual revenue value in the £millions) Understand and drive customer value, working with sales and finance to then translate this into offering and pricing models. Gain stakeholder buy in.

Implement & Manage Intake Processes – Run processes which enable customers and other Tes functions to suggest product ideas and raise work/change requests, working with the engineering function to get size estimates to inform decisions. Prioritise the near term and future roadmaps – communicate outcomes to stakeholder groups.  

Research & Insights Scoping – Work with User Researchers to design pieces of research and insight and experiment work necessary to shape future product direction. Conduct competitor analysis and benchmarking plus technology horizon scanning; attend industry conferences and engage in customer visits where useful.

Deliver:

Define High Level Initiatives & Epics (in Jira) – Complete the early high level product design work to the point of having key functionality areas identified. Ensure the identification, planning and specification of required related work (data tagging, BI reporting setup etc). Design KPIs & metrics to measure initiative success.

Support the Delivery Function: Product Owners will be responsible for doing the detailed design work preparing User Stories and working with UX Designers on screen/journey flow designs. You will be responsible for supporting them i.e. (a) resolving emergent requirements related questions, issues and decisions escalated by Product Owners (b) prioritisation calls in light of emergent challenges or delivery plan changes and (c) aligning other functions to be ready for work exiting Delivery phases.

Support Business Change – work with the Business Change function to ensure high level plans for new offerings and major large releases are created and the necessary stakeholders engaged.

Lead Product Improvement & Transformation Activity – including training and mentoring of more junior staff (e.g. Product Owners).

Drive:

Go To Market – Lead the planning and execution of work scope necessary to take products from being ‘ready for technical go-live’ through to launching new capabilities and/or products live to customers. Collaborate with all necessary functions such as Sales, Marketing, Operations Support, Business Support & Finance to plan and execute all the “non-dev” activity (e.g. creation of training material, marketing campaigns, support models etc.) that is needed.  

Success Measurement – Lead the specification of metrics/KPIs necessary to enable data evidenced measurement of the success, value and health of your releases/products. Collaborate with the Data Engineering function to ensure dashboards and reporting required to effectively communicate these are created. Ensure routine reporting goes out, using effective story-telling to get key messages to land effectively with different stakeholder groups.  

P&L Ownership – We’re transitioning to a Product owned P&L (Profit & Loss) model. Over time you will be expected to own the financial performance of your products, working closely with Sales & Marketing. You will lead how customer value is communicated externally and internally.

Insights Gathering & Exploration – Learn how your products are working well and where things could be better through avenues such as Ops & Service Reviews, Product Analytics, User Surveys & Forums etc. Use this to shape your future visions, strategies & roadmaps. Some roles will involve having to collaboratively work with other functions to set some elements of this up from scratch.  

What will you need to succeed?

Essential: Product Management experience that goes beyond the ‘Delivery’ phase (i.e. managing a backlog, defining requirements and designs, managing sprint cycles).  These roles are NOT suitable for early career Product Owners looking to transition into their first Product Manager role. 

Essential: Understanding/experience of hybrid agile delivery approaches i.e. models where some big strategic projects run on a waterfall programme management approach, smaller pieces of work (issues and change requests) run on a continuous agile kanban model and a periodic planning process brings both things together into a harmonised prioritised delivery plan. 

Essential: Commercial/Financial Awareness – If you do not have P&L experience, then experience creating business cases combined with a knowledge of foundational business financial metrics and concepts.

Highly Desirable: Experience working in a SaaS Product Organisation. We have both B2B and B2C product portfolios and have vacancies in both spaces.

Highly Desirable: Prior experience of end-to-end ownership of Products (in preference to ownership of sub-parts of existing websites, apps or other services). Experience of identifying, designing and delivering new products and/or services.   

Highly Desirable: Prior experience of owning Product P&L (Profit & Loss) including value assessments, pricing structures and FinOps (ensuring the operational costs of a product can be measured and tracked).

Desirable: Understanding/experience of matrix style delivery organisation ways of working. At Tes Product, Engineering (dev, test & tech teams), UX, Data Engineering and Business Change & Transformation are all separate functions who must work together to deliver ideas through to value. Familiarity with the role of agile delivery managers would be a plus.

Nice to Have: Education sector knowledge or experience.

Comfortable handling high levels of ambiguity and change; comfortable taking the initiative. Tes is in a period of significant transformation in part driven by several recent acquisitions. Harmonisation and standardisation of ways of working across functions/teams and countries is still ongoing in several areas including Product.

Strong stakeholder management and communication skills. 

Capable of leading process Improvement and process transformation projects in the Product sphere. Can teach/mentor more junior Product Managers and Product Owners.

Familiarity with Jira (Backlog Management System) and Figma (Design Tool)

What do you get in return?

25 days annual leave rising to 30

5% pension after probation

State of the art city centre offices

Access to a range of benefits via My Benefits World

Discounted city centre parking 

Free eye care cover

Life Assurance

Cycle to Work Scheme

EAP (Employee assistance programme)

Monthly Tes Socials

Access to an extensive Learning and Development menu

Who are Tes?

Tes has been supporting the education sector for over a century, growing and changing alongside the evolution of education. Today, Tes is focused on providing digital solutions to support school leaders and teachers with wellbeing, continuous professional development, safeguarding, SEND provision, flexibility through timetabling, and pupil behaviour management. 

Our Vision is to power schools and enable great teaching worldwide, by creating intelligent online products and services to make the greatest difference in education