Lead Product Manager in Reading

Location: Edinburgh, UK; Glasgow City, Glasgow, UK; Leeds, UK; Manchester, UK; Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; Stratford-upon-Avon CV37, UK; Worthing, UK; Reading, UK; United Kingdom

Salary: 71,725 - 87,612 per year

Employment: Flexible

Category: IT

Posted: 2026-08-15

Valid to: 2026-08-28

Employer: HM Revenue and Customs

Job summary

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’re recruiting for a Lead Product Manager at HMRC Business Tax team (Process Mining) to be part of our highly creative and collaborative teams supporting His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. We are ambitious, and we need a strong product leader to help us achieve the ambitions we have set out in our 2026/27 vision, delivering great outcomes through digital products.

This role needs a strong leader who can challenge, create, and own the product strategy. Your goal is to optimise the overall value of an area of the business tax system by contributing to solving complex and often challenging problems through the creation of great digital products.

Job description

A Product Lead is responsible for leading a number of product teams within a business area to build and release digital products or services. Product Leads understand the business goals and the high-level user needs for different user groups across the services. Product Leads also understand the organisational and business area strategies, and work with senior leaders and stakeholders to ensure the right types of products and services are being delivered to support the strategies. Product Leads also manage product managers, coach, or mentor them, and support the Head of Profession to build the capability amongst the product management profession.

Responsibilities

• Create the vision, strategy, roadmap and value proposition for a programme or portfolio of digital services, creating achievable and measurable objectives for a portfolio digital service based on transformation programme goals.
• Set product priorities, strategic direction and leadership for a programme or portfolio of products in a transformation programme.
• Create and iterate programme-level roadmaps, reporting and set the agile governance framework for product teams in a programme.
• Lead engagement with Senior Directors, Senior Civil Servants, and stakeholders to shape and influence delivery activity and governance in transformation programmes, in line with the organisation’s strategy and objectives.
• Work with other professions leads and teams across HMRC to promote user-centred and agile ways of working, and to ensure the resourcing model for multidisciplinary teams works effectively.
• Lead creation of strategic roadmaps, business cases, funding forecasts and delivery plans to define pipeline of future work in CDIO.
• Accountable for product outcomes within a transformation programme, setting KPIs and performance measures for success.
• Line manages, coach and mentor Grade 7 Product Managers and SO Associate Product Managers, responsible for increasing capability and ensuring product management standards are met.
• Work with Head of Product around recruitment, retention, and upskilling of product managers in HMRC, to define standards and best practice for Product Managers.
• Be a leader within local product management communities and other communities of interest across HMRC, managing and organising cross-government conferences and events.
• Coordinate product development across HMRC Lines of Business to identify reuse of components and patterns in services.
• Oversee live services and continuous improvement work for the product/service and management of vendor contracts as and when needed.
• Lead and support multidisciplinary product teams through discovery, alpha, beta, and live phases of development, turning vision into reality and continuously improving.

Essential Criteria:

• Experience of using lean, agile or user centred design methods (ideally all).
• Experience of building and maintaining positive relationships with senior stakeholders, including negotiating with stakeholders on difficult issues, acting as an escalation point when needed, and being able to influence stakeholders on a portfolio or service strategy.
• 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 successfully prioritising work based on what is valuable to do first across a portfolio/service/programme, managing dependencies between different products, digital and non-digital channels, etc.
• Demonstration of the ability to use qualitative or quantitative research (e.g., customer feedback, market research, service metrics, etc.) to gain insights on a problem, or potential solutions.
• Experience of coaching, mentoring and line managing others across a digital team in product management roles or other GDaD roles.
• Experience of working with digital teams and other professions to improve ways of working at scale across a number of teams.
• Experience of building capability in others and facilitating learning and development at scale, including of product management frameworks and tools.
• Demonstration of the ability to understand how to measure and track success of a programme and recalibrate areas of the programme to optimise outcomes- including demonstration of understanding the product lifecycle and knowing when to keep going on products and when to stop or pivot.
• Experience of successfully communicating with others to explain problems, present options, setting a direction for moving forward, and getting buy in for recommendations.

Desirable Criteria:

• Significant knowledge of user research, or service, content or interaction design, or software engineering practices, and how product managers can successfully work with these professions to create better products.
• Experience of managing large teams.
• Working knowledge of ITIL v4.

Benefits

• Alongside your salary of 71,725, HM Revenue and Customs contributes 20,778 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.