Product Manager - Edinburgh Regional Centre - Queen Elizabeth House

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.

We are recruiting 2 Product Managers at HMRC Business Tax/EEITTs team. The EEITTs (Excise, Environmental, Insurance, and Transport Taxes) team is a specialist product and service group within HMRC's Chief Digital Product Office (CDPO), responsible for supporting a diverse portfolio of tax regimes that underpin key areas of UK revenue collection. EEITTs covers a broad set of services and systems that enable HMRC to administer and collect taxes such as excise duties, environmental levies, insurance premium taxes, and transport related taxes. These services are often complex, highly regulated, and operationally critical, supporting both customer compliance and HMRC's assurance activities.

The team brings together product, service, delivery, and business analysis capabilities to manage the end to end lifecycle of these services, ensuring they are stable, secure, and aligned to policy and legislative requirements, while also driving modernisation and improvement. A key focus of the EEITTs team is transforming legacy tax services onto strategic platforms (such as ETMP), reducing operational risk, improving data integrity, and enabling more efficient and scalable tax administration across multiple regimes.

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.

Person specification

• 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: Product managers should be able to 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. They should be able to identify improvements and iterations based on feedback to make products more successful.
• 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.

Candidates who are offered the role will be judged as performing successfully if:

• They are regularly and sustainably delivering product features to the timelines initially negotiated.
• If there are stakeholder satisfaction and alignment around the product vision and roadmaps.
• If the product is meeting quality standards.
• Finally, if they are positively contributing to both their teams and the wider profession community.

Successful candidates in this role are often able to progress to roles such as other product management roles, Lead product manager, or service owner roles if they wish to continue their career path at HMRC.

Essential Criteria

• Demonstration of strong stakeholder management and communication skills, including experience of building and maintaining positive stakeholder relationships.
• 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.
• Demonstration of the ability to look across a number of products/services in a portfolio, and the wider marketplace, to understand how different products can work together to deliver a wider outcome.
• 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 of coaching, mentoring and line managing others across a digital team in product management roles or other GDaD roles.
• 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.
• Experience of building capability in others and facilitating learning and development at scale, including of product management frameworks and tools.
• Research and analytical skills to assess user feedback and integrate insights into product development.

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.
• Working knowledge of ITIL v4.

Benefits

• Alongside your salary of 58,541, HM Revenue and Customs contributes 16,959 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.
• HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments.
• 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.
• Family friendly policies.
• Personal support.
• Coaching and development.

To find out more about HMRC benefits and find out what it's really like to work for HMRC hear from our insiders or visit Thinking of joining the Civil Service.