Director, Product Management | London, UK

Job Purpose

The Director, Reference Data Product Management joins a dynamic team exposed to and challenged with driving revenue growth, leading the development of innovative products, and enhancing existing data assets. We are looking for a talented and passionate Product Director to help drive forward product development with a background in reference data. You should have experience leading a team and have experience building, enhancing, or supporting products related to reference data.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team through the idea generation, technical development, implementation, and launch of innovative products across asset classes.
• Be the lead contributor towards the design and implementation of new business initiatives (e.g., new products).
• Define strategy to leverage external data for effective platform/product growth within the region.
• Take a data-driven approach to product enhancements, identifying opportunity areas and contributing to the Product roadmap, prioritising work to deliver against key areas of focus.
• Partner with Strategic Delivery functions to develop and execute on product roadmaps.
• Participate in both formulating the business strategy as well as channeling it into a clearly defined direction and product strategy.
• Work with other product and development leaders to ensure alignment with their roadmaps and delivery.
• Serve a critical role in the successful integration and subsequent product buildout of strategic company acquisitions.
• Participate in cross-functional teams (e.g. Product, Business Analysis, Software Engineering) in the development of business requirements to meet customer needs.
• Collaborate with target market representatives, customers, and partners to create powerful and revenue-generating solutions for the marketplace.
• Expertise in business requirements writing.
• Requires extensive knowledge of all areas of the business including but not limited to content, development, product design, workflow, billing, and configuration.
• Must be well versed in industry and company-focused initiatives, and understand how that content could be utilised within reference data products.
• Understand the business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and help recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
• Liaise with the Stakeholders in managing, defining, prioritising, planning, and executing the vision for our applications targeting our core Data Services customers.
• Liaise with development and QA teams to deliver new features and resolve issues.
• Identify and communicate project risks and issues.
• Ability to operate in a multi-tasking and deadline-driven team environment.
• Demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning by leveraging the learning & development curriculum to augment existing knowledge, skills, and experiences.
• Maximise efficiency in a constantly evolving environment where the process is fluid and creative solutions are the norm.

Knowledge and Experience

• 8+ years of experience in the financial services industry. Ideally, some of these were when you were leading a team.
• 3+ years of experience querying/retrieving data from structured databases (SQL/Oracle, Python).
• Excellent ability to communicate technical ideas and concepts to colleagues outside the domain.
• Ability to generate creative solutions to problems and challenge processes.
• Strong collaboration skills - ability to navigate cross-functional teams to deliver on shared objectives.
• Excellent communication and listening skills with an ability to develop a clear message for senior management and craft the story around it.
• Must have the ability to develop strong relationships with colleagues at all levels of the organization.
• Organised and structured with excellent attention to detail.
• Acute understanding of how data is stored and flows through systems and databases.
• Skilled in Excel to analyse data, identify trends, and come to conclusions.
• Understanding of how to identify and develop product enhancements.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills - solid hands-on experience of functional analysis, with extensive experience translating business requirements into functional, design, and test documentation.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills - ability to work with the client/user community to translate their requirements, however expressed, into development materials and conversely present development materials to client/users in a comprehensible way.
• Must be able to supervise, organise, prioritise workload and work on numerous projects/tasks at one time.
• Ability to work with technical teams (QA and development) as well as sales and end users.
• A working knowledge, and ideally hands-on experience, of the development life cycle, covering basic design, testing cycles from unit to acceptance testing, implementation, and post-release bug/issue fixes.
• Working knowledge of SQL for data querying and analysis.
• Familiarity with a range of product interfaces (XML/JSON Files, APIs, Front-End Viewers).
• Strong communication and leadership skills.
• Bachelor's degree is a minimum.