Lead Product Manager

Job summary

Defra is the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting our world-leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Our broad remit means we play a major role in people's day-to-day life, from the food we eat, and the air we breathe, to the water we drink.

Digital, Data, Technology and Security (DDTS) is the trusted team for digital across the entire Defra Group.

We have around 1000 colleagues across DDTS and our ambition is to make it easier and faster than ever for people to interact with Defra. If you are ready to drive innovation and push boundaries, we want to hear from you. Join us and together we will create a great place for living, and a green and healthy future for all.

Find out more about DDTS:

Defra digital, data and technology blog

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We are Government Digital and Data Candidate Information Pack V3 - 1

Job description

The purpose of Lead Product Manager role:

• To deliver high quality IT products to external/internal customers.
• To set digital product strategy and deliver to a roadmap driven by customer demand and feedback.
• Key success measures for the role include meeting service levels, technical innovation, cost efficiencies at scale, reliability and financial performance.
• The role may involve ownership of technology capabilities relevant to the IT product.
• To contribute to the overall DDTS strategy.

Key results:

• Produce and maintain IT product strategy and roadmap.
• Ensure IT product performance as per SLA.
• Ensure high-level of customer satisfaction with service provided.
• Manage technology lifecycle, eliminate legacy IT products and costs.
• Ensure IT product unit cost reduction.

With the support of DDTS internal resources and suppliers, the Lead Product Manager will be accountable in the following key areas for their specific IT product/s:

Product Strategy

• Maintain IT product strategy through expertise in industry product/service trends, customer demand and interaction.
• Market product portfolio and catalogue, manage stakeholders and influence business needs.

Product Economics

• Understand all product costs and maintain overall total cost of ownership. Understand and influence cost drivers and aim to reduce product total cost of ownership year-on-year.
• Determine product pricing. Collaborate with IT service management teams to maintain accurate pricing models, catalogue options, and service levels.

Product Development

• Deliver product governance. Run design forums and ensure support from stakeholders for new features, upgrades and the associated cost implications.
• Continuously improve service provisioning, whilst ensuring safe launch into production.
• End-to-end delivery of new products and releases.
• Collaborate with non-aligned product/service owners and suppliers who contribute technical components, communicate the service roadmap and agree the build and delivery schedule to meet service release plans.

Product Lifecycle

• Communicate IT product roadmap. Maintain the 3-year IT product roadmap and communicate new features and benefits to stakeholders.
• Ensure the development of technical components including technical roadmap and engineering.

Product Performance

• Exercise accountability for service availability. Drive incident resolution, problem fixes and operational best practice with operations teams.
• Communicate service status. Deliver regular reports of service status and service adherence to SLA’s.
• Drive up customer satisfaction.

Product Demand

• Manage service consumption. Regularly check service consumption versus demand plan and adjust the capacity plan as required.
• Collaborate with operations teams to manage service capacity and prevent provisioning or availability issues.

Person specification

The Lead Product Manager needs a thorough understanding of the product lifecycle, development methodologies including agile and waterfall, IT service management best practice, commercial and financial management. Backed up by industry qualifications (ITIL).

Skills

• Excellent stakeholder management skills, informed by political and business awareness.
• Operational management - successful management of IT products in complex matrix and multi-supplier environments. Acting as the escalation point for major operational issues.
• Excellent influencing, relationship and conflict resolution skills.
• Ability to establish goals for the IT services and to establish a system of measuring effectiveness of goal attainment.
• Determining priorities effectively and stipulating the time, activities and resources required to achieve the set goals.
• Drawing sound and realistic conclusions from all the relevant information available.
• Performing effectively to deadlines, maintaining focus in challenging situations and adapting to find solutions that meet the needs of stakeholders.
• Agile working, determining the right approach for the team to take to achieve the right outcomes.
• Financial ownership skills, understanding the marketplace, realising benefits by linking work in progress back to business cases.
• Strategic ownership – developing long term vision and objectives for IT products.

Experience

• Extensive experience in a similar role.
• Management of IT products in a multi supplier outsourced environment.
• Product development including agile and waterfall delivery methodologies.
• Establishing product roadmaps.
• Establishing and monitoring procedures to control and regulate employee tasks and activities as well as one's own tasks and responsibilities.
• Experience of working within constraints, working with and challenging senior stakeholders, prioritising and mitigating constraints.
• User focused – experienced in meeting the needs of a diverse user base, applying strategic thinking in how to provide the best service to the end user.
• Experienced in multiple parts of the product lifecycle, recognising the appropriate deliverables and how to meet them and can plan and engage with appropriate stakeholders at a particular stage of the lifecycle.

Selection process

The Civil Service marks each element of the selection process on a merit basis. You can visit the gov.uk website for further information on the Civil Service rating scale.

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