Product Manager - IBM MQ, ACE, ITX & Instana in Sheffield

Product Manager - IBM MQ, ACE, ITX & Instana

Location: Sheffield (Hybrid - 2 day per week in the office)

Experience Required: 7 to 11 Years

About the Opportunity

We are seeking an experienced Product Manager to lead the strategy, governance, lifecycle management, and operational excellence of enterprise middleware, integration, and observability platforms. This is an exciting opportunity to take ownership of critical technologies including IBM MQ, IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE), IBM Transformation Extender (ITX), IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM), and Instana within a large-scale, complex enterprise environment.

The successful candidate will drive product roadmaps, platform modernization initiatives, reliability improvements, security compliance, and stakeholder engagement across global technology teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end product strategy, roadmap, and lifecycle management for IBM MQ, ACE, ITX, ITM, and Instana platforms.
• Develop and maintain multi-quarter roadmaps focused on security, resilience, automation, platform currency, and customer experience.
• Drive lifecycle initiatives including upgrades, standardization, decommissioning, and technical debt reduction.
• Prioritize platform demand based on risk, customer impact, operational requirements, regulatory obligations, and cost considerations.

Governance & Platform Standards

• Define and enforce platform standards, governance controls, and reference architectures.
• Lead governance forums to improve standardization, manage exceptions, and accelerate platform adoption.
• Maintain service catalogues, platform documentation, standards, and consumption patterns.

Service Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Own platform health, performance, availability, resilience, and capacity outcomes.
• Define and monitor KPIs, SLIs, SLOs, MTTR, incident trends, and operational performance metrics.
• Lead major incident reviews, root cause analysis, reliability engineering initiatives, and continuous service improvements.
• Ensure Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA) requirements are established, tested, and evidenced.

Delivery & Transformation

• Translate product roadmaps into prioritised backlogs and delivery plans.
• Lead platform upgrades, migrations, automation programmes, monitoring enhancements, and security hardening initiatives.
• Support adoption of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Hybrid Cloud, and container-based technologies.
• Ensure platforms comply with security, risk, audit, and regulatory requirements.
• Manage vulnerability remediation, certificate lifecycle management, access controls, and secure platform configurations.
• Support audits and drive remediation of identified risk findings.
• Act as a senior stakeholder interface across Engineering, Architecture, Operations, Cyber Security, and Application Development teams.
• Drive customer onboarding, platform adoption, and self-service capabilities.
• Manage relationships with IBM and other technology vendors, including licensing, support escalations, renewals, and cost optimisation.
• 7+ years of Product Management or Service Management experience within enterprise middleware, messaging, integration, or observability platforms.
• Deep expertise in IBM MQ.
• Strong experience with IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE).
• Experience with IBM Transformation Extender (ITX).
• Hands-on knowledge of IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) and/or Instana.
• Proven experience managing platform lifecycle programmes, upgrades, standardisation initiatives, deprecation strategies, and technical debt reduction.
• Strong understanding of service reliability, incident management, SLIs, SLOs, KPIs, capacity planning, DR, and HA.
• Demonstrated stakeholder management across engineering, architecture, security, and business functions.
• Experience working within large, complex, multi-region enterprise environments.

Technical Expertise

IBM MQ

• Upgrade and standardisation programmes.
• Enterprise HA/DR implementations.
• Security controls including mTLS and certificate management.

IBM ACE

• Integration standards and governance.
• Performance optimisation and tuning.

IBM ITX

• Transformation map governance.
• Version control management.
• Controlled promotion and release processes.
• Runtime support and operational management.

Observability & Monitoring

• Strong experience with Instana, ITM, or equivalent monitoring solutions.
• Dashboard creation, observability strategy, performance monitoring, and service health reporting.
• Financial Services industry experience.
• Exposure to Hybrid Cloud platforms, Containers, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience managing software licensing, renewals, and commercial vendor relationships.
• Working within regulated environments with strict audit, compliance, and change governance requirements.

What You'll Bring

• Strong product ownership mindset.
• Strategic planning and roadmap management expertise.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and influencing skills.
• A passion for platform reliability, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
• The ability to drive change and standardisation across globally distributed teams.