Senior Product Manager (Technical)

Job summary

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring or growth and innovation
6. committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.

Job description

We're looking for an experienced product manager to join GOV.UK's Platform Engineering team as our Senior Technical Product Manager.

The GOV.UK platform is what lets our service teams commit code and see it running in production shortly after, without thinking about the compute, networking, deployment or monitoring underneath. It runs on Kubernetes in AWS and serves multiple applications. The team is small, experienced and technical: software engineers, site reliability engineers, technical architecture and cyber security specialists.

Your job is to run the platform as a product and develop a product strategy that harnesses the engineering expertise in the team.

The successful candidate will be able to gather and analyse user needs from a range of technical users, make informed choices about priorities, and demonstrate to senior stakeholders the value of what gets done. You’ll own the platform’s roadmap, its product metrics and its evidence base, and will work with the Lead Product Manager to present the platform’s progress and needs at senior level.

This is a role for someone who enjoys working alongside technologists as part of a multi-disciplinary team. You’ll be the only product person embedded in the team, with the independence and the responsibility that brings.

As a Senior Product Manager (Technical), you’ll:

• foster a platform-as-product approach and culture, developing an expert understanding of the platform’s users, their needs and their behaviours
• define, explain and iterate an evidence-based product vision that's compelling to your team, users and stakeholders
• maintain a roadmap and product strategy that show your strategic plans at different horizons and granularities
• define, measure and report a small set of platform product metrics, and use them to demonstrate the platform’s value to senior stakeholders
• work with the Lead Product Manager to present the platform’s progress, needs and trade-offs at senior level.
• set clear, measurable, outcome-oriented goals with the team, balancing developer-facing benefits with reliability, security, and other service-level considerations.
• collaborate with team members on prototypes and other low-cost ways to test assumptions and safely use test-and-learn approaches where appropriate.
• engage users and stakeholders through a range of channels to encourage take-up and use of the platform’s paved paths.
• work with delivery colleagues to minimise work in progress and encourage rapid learning.
• play an active role in the government product manager community, sharing your learning and celebrating progress made by other people and teams.
• line manage 1-2 Product Managers, supporting their growth and development

Person specification

You'll be keen to work on internal, technical platforms and to apply your product management skills to a platform-as-product approach. Prior experience of Product Management in a Platform context is desirable but not essential. What is essential is that you’ve product-managed something with technical users, where the product had to prove its value to survive.

We’re interested in people who have:

• experience product-managing internal or technical products: developer tooling, platforms, APIs or infrastructure services
• a track record of defining, measuring and reporting performance objectives for a product, ideally where no measurement existed before
• effective verbal, written and visual communication, tailored to the audience, especially presenting technical subject matter to senior non-technical leadership
• experience using data, research and insight to spot problems, prioritise and evaluate success
• proficiency in agile product management: roadmaps, prioritisation, user stories, MVP definition, planning at different horizons
• enough technical fluency to work credibly with engineers: you understand what containers, infrastructure as code and production operations are for, without needing to operate them
• experience improving technical practices and team culture

Benefits

There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:

• flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
• a Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
• 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
• an extra day off for the King’s birthday
• an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
• career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
• a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
• job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
• advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
• death in service benefits
• cycle to work scheme and facilities
• access to an employee discounts scheme
• 10 learning days per year
• volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
• access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning

Any move to Government Digital Service from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility at https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk

Office attendance
The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.
DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).

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