Senior Product Manager

Frontiers; Madrid; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Office presence

Wellbeing days

Volunteering days

Employee assistance

Learning & Development

Healthcare & pension

Job summary

Frontiers is seeking a Senior Product Manager to own a defined product, platform, or workflow area within our publishing ecosystem. The exact domain will be confirmed at the offer stage based on where the business need and the candidate's strengths best align.

You will own your product end to end: understanding user and business needs, defining the roadmap, coordinating with engineering, design and operations to ship it, and being accountable for outcomes.

Qualifications

• Clarity of thought and structure in ambiguous problems.
• Proven track record in product management with cross-functional ownership.
• Ability to gather, document, and unify requirements from multiple stakeholders.
• Comfortable discussing workflows, data, and system design with engineers.
• Demonstrated user-centric design approach and delivering intuitive experiences.
• Experience influencing multiple roadmaps toward shared outcomes without direct authority.
• Ability to measure outcomes and communicate impact clearly.
• Ownership mindset: proactively solve obstacles and drive decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own roadmaps for product areas, balancing user needs with business priorities.
• Gather and reconcile requirements from internal teams, partners, and end users.
• Collaborate with engineering, design and other product teams to ship the roadmap.
• Engage with authors, editors, reviewers, partners, and internal stakeholders to uncover needs.
• Propose pragmatic solutions that scale and avoid fragmentation.
• Drive evidence-based decisions by defining and tracking key metrics.
• Set a clear product vision aligned with Frontiers' one-platform strategy.
• Build a strong business case including investment, returns, and payback.
• Lead engineers, designers and analysts toward shared goals without formal reporting lines.
• Identify AI and automation opportunities to reduce manual work and improve outcomes.
• Plan rollout, train users, and measure adoption after launch.

Skills

Clarity of thought

Product management

Requirements discipline

Technical literacy

User-centric design

Cross-team influence

Outcomes measurement

Ownership and accountability

Domain exposure

AI/ML awareness

Job description

Who We Are

At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet.

We are one of the world's largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere. To date, Frontiers research has been viewed over 4 billion times, demonstrating the real-world impact of science without barriers

Joining Frontiers means being part of a global, mission-driven organisation at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation — working alongside passionate colleagues who care deeply about advancing knowledge for the benefit of society.

To learn more about our impact and culture, please watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLJ7ZO3wOW4

About the Role

Frontiers is seeking a Senior Product Manager to own a defined product, platform, or workflow area within our publishing ecosystem. The exact domain — submission, peer review, production, partnerships, AI, or another area — will be confirmed at the offer stage based on where the business need and the candidate's strengths best align. This description sets the bar and shape of the role common to all our Senior PM positions, so that candidates can be assessed once and matched to the right opening.

You will own your product end to end: understanding user and business needs, defining the roadmap, working with engineering, design and operational stakeholders to ship it, and being accountable for the outcomes it produces. You will operate within Frontiers' one-platform strategy — favouring shared, scalable workflows over bespoke, one-off solutions — regardless of which domain you land in.

You will not wait for a perfect brief. You will spot the problem, make a call with the data you have, and go find the rest. We want someone who treats a blocker as a puzzle to solve, not a reason to pause.

Key Responsibilities

• Roadmap ownership: Define and drive the roadmap for your product area, balancing user needs, business priorities, and platform constraints into a clear, sequenced plan.
• Requirements discipline: Gather, document, and reconcile requirements from multiple stakeholders — internal teams, partners, or end users — into a coherent, scalable product definition rather than a pile of one-off requests.
• Cross-team delivery: Work with and through engineering, design, and other product teams to ship your roadmap, tracking dependencies and resolving conflicts without necessarily having direct authority over every team involved.
• User- and stakeholder-facing discovery: Engage directly with the people who use or depend on your product — authors, editors, reviewers, partners, or internal teams — to uncover real underlying needs and validate that proposed solutions solve them.
• Creative, pragmatic solutioning: Where requirements conflict with simplicity or scale, propose solutions — configuration over customisation, shared workflows over bespoke branches — that satisfy the intent without fragmenting the platform.
• Evidence-led decisions: Steer your roadmap with data: define the metrics that matter for your area, track them, and show what you measured, what you changed, and what moved. Be ready to change course when the data says you were wrong.
• Quality and risk ownership: Hold the bar for whatever your product area delivers, and manage risk transparently when timelines, dependencies, or stakeholder expectations are under pressure. Define acceptance criteria, test with real users before release, and own post-launch quality.
• Product vision: Set a clear vision for your product area and connect it to Frontiers' one-platform strategy, so every roadmap choice traces back to a purpose.
• Business outcome ownership: Build and defend the business case for your product. Set the investment, expected return and payback, and answer for whether it was worth it.
• Team leadership: Lead your squad of engineers, designers and analysts toward shared goals. Coach, set direction and raise the bar, even without formal reporting lines.
• Managing up: Give the Head of Product and senior leadership regular, candid updates on progress, risks and trade-offs. Bring a recommendation with each decision you need.
• AI and automation: Find where AI agents and automation can remove manual work or improve outcomes in your area. Then scope, ship and measure them.
• Launch and adoption: Take your product from idea through launch to adoption. Plan rollout, train users, then track usage and iterate until the outcome moves.
• Resourceful problem-solving: When data, access or alignment is missing, say what you need, from whom and how you will get it. Keep moving in the meantime.

Requirements

• Clarity of thought: You think critically and bring structure and clear rationale to ambiguous, cross-domain problems.
• Experience: 5+ years in Product Management, ideally including ownership of a multi-stakeholder, operations-heavy, or platform-level product.
• Requirements practitioner: Proven ability to gather, document, and unify requirements from multiple demanding stakeholders into a coherent product definition.
• Technical literacy: Comfortable discussing workflows, data, and system design with engineers, and reading the evidence behind a problem, without needing to be a domain specialist on day one.
• User-centric design: A track record of turning a complex process into an experience that different types of users can complete with confidence.
• Cross-team influence: Experience delivering through other teams and aligning multiple roadmaps toward a shared outcome, including without direct authority over every team involved.
• Outcomes: You can point to what you measured, what you changed, and what moved as a result of your product work.
• Ownership and agency: You take responsibility without being asked. When you hit an obstacle, you ask "how do I get this done?" and propose a path. You treat mistakes as information and move on quickly.
• Domain exposure: Background in academic publishing, SaaS platforms, multi-tenant B2B products, or AI/ML products is a plus, but strong learning agility can substitute for direct domain experience.

Benefits

• We prioritise office presence and emphasise in-person collaboration, but also offer appropriate adjustments where needed, in line with company policy
• Extra wellbeing days on top of your annual leave allowance
• Up to 3 paid volunteering days each year
• 24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme (wellbeing, mental health, legal & financial support)
• Learning & development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub
• Competitive local benefits country dependent (e.g. healthcare and pension/retirement provision)

Frontiers actively embraces diversity and is a safe and welcoming workplace. Recruitment is free from discrimination - including based on race, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. With employees from more than 50 different nations, our diversity creates vibrant teams and constantly challenges us to appreciate multiple perspectives.