Product Manager - Birmingham

About the job

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it's really like to work at HMRC. At HMRC, we are already one of the most digital advanced tax authorities in the world and have one of the largest IT infrastructures and data sources in the UK. With 50 million customers to serve, over 60 thousand colleagues to support, and 600 billion to collect to fund UK Plc, our IT operation is huge! For those who are up to the challenge, we offer unique and unparalleled opportunities to work with some of the newest technologies and make a real, lasting difference.

The Secure Digital Exchange & Communications (SDEC) is a strategic digital service designed to enable secure, efficient, and standardised exchange of data across internal systems and external partners. It supports the organisation's digital transformation by providing a scalable platform for data ingestion, validation, storage, and dissemination, ensuring compliance with security and governance standards. SDEC aims to streamline data flows, reduce manual processing, and improve accessibility to high-quality data, enabling better decision-making, enhanced customer services, and more agile delivery of future capabilities.

A Product Manager is responsible for ensuring that a product is of high quality and delivers value. They manage their products through various phases of the product lifecycle, from discovery, development and build, to live running. They balance the goals of the organisation with the needs of end users, and the skills of the product team to scope and build the right products, and prioritise how to iterate them over time. Additionally, they may be involved in recruiting and managing personnel within the product team, ensuring they hire the right individuals that are supported, and developed.

Responsibilities:

• Set the product vision, strategy and scope: Define how the product will work to support the organisation or service's goals, and set the scope for what the product will initially do as an MVP, to how it will continually improve or the organisation and end user needs change for a large product or service.
• Stakeholder management: Engage with stakeholders to understand their goals from the service and product, secure their buy-in for the product vision and roadmap, and maintain good working relationships, including managing negotiations over the scope and timelines for product development.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary product teams: Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team, which could include user researchers, service designers, business analysis, and software engineers, to shape and build the product.
• User Insight Integration: Work with performance analysts and user researchers to gather customer insights on products for iteration and improvement.
• Develop and maintain the roadmap: Prioritise the order in which high level features and functionality is built and released, based on what is most valuable to build first, and communicate this through roadmapping.
• Get buy in for the roadmap from key stakeholders and maintain the roadmap, prioritising and adding enhancements to the product over time to continually improve the product.
• Develop and maintain the backlog: Identify the team tasks ('user stories') to build the functionality on the roadmap, and create a backlog of user stories.
• Implement the relevant processes such as sprint planning or kanban, so the team is regularly working through the backlog to build and release features, and maintain the backlog to a high quality standard.
• Build and maintain products to a high quality standard: Collaborate with colleagues such as designers, user researchers, BAs or engineers to create products that are highly reliable, usable, and accessible for users with accessibility needs, in line with the government service standards.
• Track and improve product performance: Define how the product will support the organisation's goal, how that success will be measured (by defining the objectives and key results), and measure progress against these.
• Option Evaluation: Collaborate with area leads to assess development options for products or services, including high-level financial implications.
• Community Engagement: Actively participate in the product management community of practice through initiatives, sessions, talks, or activities that help other product managers.
• Support and develop other product managers: This can be through line management, coaching or mentoring more junior product managers or supporting peers.

Essential Criteria:

• Experience of leading a product team or project team to deliver its stated outcomes.
• Ability to define and adapt product scopes based on new insights.
• Experience of understanding problems within a service, product or process, and finding a positive solution to resolve the issue.
• Experience of being able to prioritise work based on what is valuable to do first, and getting buy in from stakeholders for any associated project plans/ rollout plans/ roadmaps.
• Experience in backlog management and prioritisation.
• Ability to collaborate with other professions and skillsets, particularly in digital product contexts.
• Skills in accessibility compliance and the ability to ensure products meet necessary standards.
• Research and analytical skills to assess user feedback and integrate insights into product development.
• Demonstration of strong stakeholder management and communication skills, including experience of building and maintaining positive stakeholder relationships.

Desirable Criteria:

• Knowledge of user research, or service or interaction design, or software engineering practices, and how to apply them to design better products.
• Prior experience of working on digital services.
• Prior experience of agile working.
• Experience of managing junior staff members.
• Certification in agile or product management may be advantageous.

HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments. We welcome applications from those who need to work a more flexible arrangement and will agree to requests where possible, considering our operational and customer service needs.

We offer a generous leave allowance, starting at 25 days and increasing by a day for every year of qualifying service up to a maximum of 30 days.

Pension - We make contributions to our colleagues' Alpha pension equal to at least 28.97% of their salary.