Qualification Product Manager (English) in Guildford

At AQA we focus on understanding customer needs deeply and translating them into high-quality qualifications and support services. As a Product Manager, you will bring strong commercial awareness, stakeholder engagement, and matrix management skills to help turn strategic vision into meaningful outcomes.

This is a key role in setting and delivering strategic plans, and you will be accountable for managing and developing a portfolio of qualification products across a range of subject areas.

Using data and customer insights, you’ll uncover and evaluate market opportunities and innovations, liaising with internal and external stakeholders and influencers to capture and develop ideas. The Product Manager will also work closely with subject experts and stakeholders across AQA to ensure our products meet the changing educational demands and create real impact for learners and our customers.

With curriculum and assessment reform on the horizon, the education landscape is evolving and there are opportunities at AQA to shape the future of learning in a growing Product Management team.

Led by the Director of Product Management, the team is divided into portfolios, including English, Science, Maths, two portfolio subject groups, development team along with Publishing, Content and Resource, Data Analyst and Performance Planning lead. The Product Managers will report into the relevant Heads of Product for their portfolio and will collaborate frequently with colleagues from Subject Support and Assessment and regularly with colleagues across Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations and external stakeholders and customers.

The Product Managers are individual contributors with no line reports, but do lead working groups and project teams in a matrix style of working. The role sets strategy at a product level, including raising business cases and taking accountability for project budgets.

Activities

• Defining, communicating and managing the delivery of the strategy and roadmap for a specified portfolio of products.
• Delivering quality products and outcomes as recognised by the customer.
• Analysing and interpreting data and information from different sources to make recommendations and to inform sound strategic and operational decisions that drive change and improve our offer, in line with wider business goals.
• Leading and liaising with cross-functional teams to ensure the delivery of planned activities, tracking and reporting on delivery to ensure delivery of strategic projects on time and on budget.
• Collaborating with colleagues to develop evidence-based proposals and financial business cases, and monitor and update financial targets for products.
• Where appropriate represent AQA, attending conferences, exhibitions, and stakeholder visits, working closely with colleagues from the science Subject Support teams.
• Ensuring that AQA’s regulatory product data on regulators’ portals is always compliant.
• Maintaining the Qualifications Data Catalogue (QDC) and the Assessment Product Catalogue (APC) on Microsoft Dynamics to ensure accurate data is readily available to colleagues, customers and regulators.
• Close collaboration with the Regulatory Relationships Team and a wide range of other teams and stakeholders is essential.

To be successful in this role, you will need to demonstrate:

Essential Criteria

• Knowledge: Knowledge of Product Portfolio Management; an understanding of the educational landscape and AQA’s products, customers and the market in which it operates.
• Skills: Commercially astute with proven strategic planning and operational delivery expertise; demonstrable interpersonal and communication skills; able to influence and build rapport with a diverse range of stakeholders internally and externally; able to think strategically and understand the commercial context in which AQA operates; able to see the big picture and understand how different services, materials and activities relate to the delivery of a quality product as a whole; able to think creatively to find solutions to complex and intangible problems; able to negotiate effectively and balance competing priorities in complex situations; able to understand and synthesise complex, diverse and incomplete information, including qualitative and quantitative information, and use it to support sound decision making; able to constructively challenge the thinking of others.