Product Manager (For Independent Contractors)

Details

A Product Manager drives the design, development, and implementation of products based on user needs and the company's product strategy and vision. The role focuses on solving customer and partner pain points, identifying opportunities to improve their experience, and leading a single development team within a relatively narrow scope and limited set of cross-functional stakeholders.

Products and features owned by the Product Manager should achieve meaningful impact within the context of their department. In an optimisation setting, this may involve meaningful incremental performance improvements. In a new product development setting, this may involve validating new concepts that lead to relevant and meaningful new business investments. The Product Manager also participates in the wider product community, including attending or giving talks about product craft.

Responsibilities

Product Strategy

• Own and set the vision for the product or feature, informed by data, user research, and the overarching product-area vision.
• Lay out a one-year strategy to achieve the vision as part of the department's strategy and align key stakeholders, including the team, on this strategy.
• Own and define team-level objectives.
• Typically own or collaborate with a Product Marketing Manager to create a go-to-market plan for the product.

Product Delivery

• Prioritise the short- and mid-term roadmap, typically covering less than one year, based on strategy and objectives.
• Identify risks and dependencies early and plan mitigations.
• Work with the team to establish a tactical delivery methodology, such as Scrum, Kanban, hours, or points, and execute plans.

Data Fluency

• Identify and explain the choice of primary metrics, supporting metrics, and counter metrics.
• Understand what makes a solid hypothesis for experimentation.
• Understand the statistical mechanics of experimentation, including determining test power and sample size.
• Analyse data and present findings to stakeholders to support product decisions.
• Define, with analysts, effective ways to present KPIs for tracking product success.

Customer Insight

• Use techniques such as interviews and surveys to better understand customer behaviour.
• Gather customer needs and pain points and apply techniques such as story mapping and use-case design.
• Understand different research methods and select appropriate methods for the problems being solved.
• Apply research practices and principles in partnership with researchers to distil feedback into actionable hypotheses.
• Analyse and distil customer feedback from surveys, field research, analytics, operations feedback, and other sources into actionable hypotheses.
• Identify unmet needs, validate or invalidate new concepts, and improve existing products.
• Illustrate overall customer behaviour by blending multiple sources of product insights.
• Apply user-experience design practices and principles in partnership with designers to visualise product problems and guide the team's direction.

Stakeholder Management

• Identify teams and key stakeholders impacted by current projects.
• Gather stakeholders' key requirements and work with the manager to integrate feedback.
• Represent the team's work in a convincing and engaging way.
• Incorporate stakeholder requirements and feedback independently.
• Manage stakeholder expectations through timely, concise, and clear progress updates adapted to stakeholder needs and delivered through different mediums.
• Manage expectations up to Group Product Manager level and occasionally Director level.

Technical Fluency

• Partner with the Engineering Manager.
• Understand the technical solutions used to deliver the product.
• Advocate for the customer and business in engineering trade-off decisions.
• Actively learn the technical side of the work.
• Understand and explain the most critical elements of the technical solution and justify the chosen technical solutions.
• Ensure a high-quality user experience by demonstrating technical awareness and understanding of risks.
• Build bridges between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Community Impact

• Participate in the Product Manager craft community outside the assigned track and contribute where relevant.
• Organise craft sessions for and with other Product Managers in the track.
• Participate as an interviewer for Product Manager roles.

Details

• Engagement: Independent contractor
• Duration: 6 months
• Dates: November 12, 2026 to May 11, 2027
• Hours: 40 hours per week