Security Cleared (SC) Senior Technical Product Manager in Cheltenham

Job Description Summary

Responsible for operating in lock-step with product management teams to create a clear strategic direction for development needs and conveys that vision to the build and/or operations team. You will direct the team with a clear and descriptive set of requirements and partner with the team to determine what can be delivered through balancing the need for new features, defects, and technical debt. Your priority is seamless integration and alignment of perspectives from a broad set of stakeholders: Product Managers, Technical Anchors, Product Owners and Developers.

Job Description Roles and Responsibilities

• Demonstrate superior product and industry knowledge and help the organization to gain the competitive edge.
• Interact with customers/stakeholders in VOC requirements-gathering, fine-tuning, and obtaining product feedback.
• Work with cross-functional teams to deliver features and major, complex products.
• Possess a deep understanding of the technology stack and impact on the final product.
• Routinely collaborate with UX, Architecture and engineering teams on multiple issues and decisions.
• Conduct customer and stakeholder interviews and elaborate on personas.
• Demonstrate expert persuasion and influencing skills that ensure alignment between customer, product manager and engineering teams.
• Own the release and sprint backlogs short-term roadmap for MVPs and quarterly releases.
• Own and manage the backlog; continuously order and prioritise to ensure that 1-2 sprints/iterations of backlog are always ready.
• Prioritise continuously in accordance with the understanding and validation of customer problems and needs.
• Demonstrate strategic expert level skills in problem decomposition and ability to navigate through ambiguity.
• Engage frequently (50% of the time) with the development team; facilitate discussions, provide clarification, story acceptance and refinement, testing and validation; contribute to design activities and decisions.
• Translate unstructured or ambiguous work requests into actionable user stories and work units.
• Partner with Development Leadership to ensure a healthy development process.
• Mentor junior team members.
• Provide technical leadership to TPMs across the organisation.
• Expert in Agile Methodology: Coach others.

Desired Characteristics

• Strong knowledge of software design and coding principles.
• Experience working in an Agile environment.
• Familiarity with versatile implementation options.
• Demonstrates knowledge on technical topics, such as caching, APIs, data transfer, scalability, and security.

• Demonstrates the initiative to explore alternate technology and approaches to solving problems.
• Skilled in breaking down problems, documenting problem statements and estimating efforts.
• Has the ability to analyse the impact of technology choices.
• Skilled in negotiation to align stakeholders and communicate a single synthesized perspective to the scrum team.
• Balances value propositions for competing stakeholders.
• Demonstrates knowledge of the competitive environment.
• Demonstrates knowledge of technologies in the market to help make buy vs build recommendations, scope MVPs, and to drive market timing decisions.

• Influences through others; builds direct and "behind the scenes" support for ideas.
• Pre-emptively sees downstream consequences and effectively tailors influencing strategy to support a positive outcome.
• Able to verbalise what is behind decisions and downstream implications.
• Continuously reflecting on success and failures to improve performance and decision-making.
• Understands when change is needed.
• Participates in technical strategy planning.

• Able to effectively direct and mentor others in critical thinking skills.
• Proactively engages with cross-functional teams to resolve issues and design solutions using critical thinking and analysis skills and best practices.
• Finds important patterns in seemingly unrelated information.
• Influences and energises others toward the common vision and goal.
• Maintains excitement for a process and drives to new directions of meeting the goal even when odds and setbacks render one path impassable.
• Innovates and integrates new processes and/or technology to significantly add value.
• Identifies how the cost of change weighs against the benefits and advises accordingly.
• Proactively learns new solutions and processes to address seemingly unanswerable problems.

Security Clearance

Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) clearance is required and must be maintained for this role. Please note that in the event that BPSS clearance cannot be obtained, you may not be eligible for the role and/or any offer of employment may be withdrawn on grounds of national security.

Applications from job seekers who require sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. However, under the applicable UK immigration rules, it may be that candidates who do not currently have the right to work in the UK may not be appointed to a post if a suitably qualified, experienced and skilled candidate who does not require sponsorship is available to take up the post.