Product Manager

Zudu; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company pension

Healthcare (Vitality)

Maternity/paternity leave

30 days leave + birthday off

Job summary

Zudu in Scotland is seeking a Product Manager to lead client-facing product work across engagements, turning complex challenges into valuable digital outcomes. You’ll own discovery through delivery, collaborate with Design, Engineering and Commercial, and guide roadmaps and backlog while ensuring a strong client partnership.

The role is hybrid from our Edinburgh office, offering an opportunity to shape products for high-growth clients within the UK and beyond.

Qualifications

• An experienced Product Manager or Product Owner with a strong track record of delivering digital products and services.
• Experience working directly with clients or senior stakeholders and multidisciplinary delivery teams.
• Ability to lead product discovery, definition and delivery from ideas through to launch and iteration.
• Experience turning ambiguous customer needs into clear product direction and actionable delivery work.
• Strong backlog management, prioritisation and roadmap development skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead product vision and backlog strategy across customer engagements with designers, developers and stakeholders.
• Translate business objectives into user stories, acceptance criteria and actionable tasks.
• Prioritise features based on user value, analytics and strategic goals.
• Guide Agile processes including sprint planning, discovery workshops and retrospectives.
• Collaborate across Product, Design and Engineering to shape delivery across engagements.

Skills

Product management

Client-facing

Stakeholder management

Agile delivery

Discovery & definition

Roadmapping

Job description

We are pleased to announce a new opportunity for a Product Manager to join our team. This is a full-time permanent role based in Scotland, working hybrid from our Edinburgh office.

Who You’ll Be Working With

At Zudu, we’re building more than software. We partner with ambitious organisations to deliver AI-enabled, human-driven digital products that create real impact. Our teams move fast, think smart, and work side by side with clients to solve challenges that matter. We’re outcome-obsessed and relentlessly human in everything we do.

As part of our exponential growth, we’re looking for people who want to be part of something exciting: high-growth, high-impact projects with some of the most forward-thinking businesses in the UK and beyond. If you want to challenge the norm, deliver innovation at speed, and do your best work alongside a collaborative, ambitious team, Zudu is where you’ll thrive.

What You’ll Be Doing

This is a hands‑on, client‑facing product role. You will lead product work across customer engagements, working closely with clients, Design, Engineering, Quality Engineering and Commercial to turn complex challenges into coherent, valuable and deliverable digital products. You will take ownership from early discovery through product definition, delivery and iteration.

The focus is on establishing clear product scope with the client, making trade‑offs visible, turning unanswered questions into decisions and giving teams the shared understanding they need to deliver successfully. If you want real responsibility, autonomy, and the chance to shape a capability, read on.

• Lead product vision and backlog strategy, collaborating with designers, developers, and stakeholders to deliver exceptional digital experiences.
• Translate business objectives into clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and actionable development tasks.
• Prioritise features based on user value, analytics insights, and strategic goals, ensuring the team is always working on the most impactful tasks.
• Guide Agile processes (e.g., sprint planning, discovery workshops, retrospectives).
• Continuously gather feedback via user research, data analytics, and stakeholder input.
• Monitor product performance and iterate based on user data and market trends.
• Champion collaboration, roadmapping, and a shared vision across teams.

What You Will Work On

You will work across bespoke web platforms, business‑critical applications, mobile apps, digital services, API integrations and data‑enabled products, on a mix of greenfield builds and existing products at scale.

Our clients trust us with meaningful problems. You may join an engagement at the earliest stage to understand the opportunity, help turn a broad concept into a bounded proposition, lead discovery and product definition, or take ownership of an existing product through delivery and iteration. You will see your work used in the real world, not parked in backlog purgatory.

You will help shape and improve how product management is practised across Zudu, working alongside colleagues across Product, Design and Engineering.

Responsibilities

Product Strategy and Direction

• Understanding the customer, their users, the business problem and the outcomes the product must create
• Establishing and communicating a clear product vision, direction and measures of success
• Connecting user needs, customer goals, commercial context and technical feasibility
• Shaping product strategies and roadmaps that are valuable, realistic and aligned with the client’s vision
• Using evidence, data and product judgement to guide priorities and trade-offs

Discovery and Product Definition

• Leading collaborative discovery with customers, users, Design and Engineering
• Framing problems before committing to solutions
• Turning complex or ambiguous needs into a coherent and bounded Product Definition
• Defining relevant journeys, behaviours, capabilities, data, rules, integrations and acceptance criteria
• Surfacing assumptions, dependencies, exclusions, contradictions and open questions
• Facilitating workshops that result in clear decisions, shared understanding and meaningful next steps

Scope and Commercial Alignment

• Working with Commercial and Engineering during scoping and estimation
• Making product boundaries, assumptions, dependencies and customer responsibilities explicit
• Ensuring the proposed product is sufficiently understood for Engineering to estimate and Commercial to price responsibly
• Assessing new requests against the agreed product and identifying whether they are clarification, reprioritisation or potential scope change
• Communicating the impact of product decisions and trade‑offs clearly and early
• Supporting proposals, statements of work and change control where required

Roadmap and Backlog Management

• Translating product direction and definition into a clear, outcome‑led roadmap
• Maintaining a prioritised, high‑quality and delivery‑ready backlog
• Keeping decisions, requirements, designs and delivery work connected and current
• Balancing business goals, delivery effort, risk and commercial constraints
• Making timely product decisions so teams can maintain momentum

Client and Stakeholder Leadership

• Building strong, trusted relationships with customer stakeholders
• Rapidly understanding different organisations, industries and operational contexts
• Bringing recommendations and constructively challenging assumptions where needed
• Communicating direction, progress, decisions, risks and uncertainty transparently
• Guiding customers towards valuable, user‑centred and deliverable outcomes
• Creating alignment between decision‑makers, users and delivery teams

Multidisciplinary Delivery

• Working side by side with Design, Engineering and Quality Engineering throughout the product lifecycle
• Bringing the right disciplines into discovery and definition at the right time
• Supporting delivery planning while maintaining ownership of product priorities and decisions
• Reviewing completed work against the agreed Product Definition and acceptance criteria
• Supporting successful product acceptance, handover and iteration

Product Practice and Capability

• Contributing to Zudu’s product management standards, methods and reusable assets
• Sharing learning and good practice across engagements
• Supporting and coaching colleagues as the product capability grows
• Helping improve how we approach discovery, product definition, scope management and outcome measurement
• Using AI to improve product research, synthesis, definition and delivery without replacing human accountability

What Success Looks Like

Within the first 12–18 months, this role would be expected to deliver:

• Customer engagements with clear product direction, agreed outcomes and visible priorities
• Coherent and bounded Product Definitions that teams can confidently design, estimate, build and validate
• Better alignment between customer decisions, commercial commitments, designs, requirements and delivery
• Product risks, dependencies and scope questions surfaced and resolved earlier
• High‑quality, prioritised backlogs that remain ahead of delivery
• Stronger customer trust through informed recommendations, constructive challenge and transparent communication
• Reduced ambiguity, avoidable rework and informal scope expansion during delivery
• Clearer evidence of the value and outcomes created by the products we deliver
• Reusable product practices and assets that improve consistency across projects
• A stronger, scalable product management capability capable of supporting Zudu’s future growth

What We Are Looking For

Experience

• An experienced Product Manager or Product Owner with a strong track record of delivering digital products and services
• Experience working directly with clients or senior stakeholders, and multidisciplinary delivery teams
• Experience leading product discovery, definition and delivery from early ideas through to launch and iteration
• Experience turning ambiguous customer needs into clear product direction and actionable delivery work
• Experience managing scope, priorities, dependencies, risk and difficult trade‑offs
• Experience working in an agency or similar client‑facing role
• Evidence of owning meaningful outcomes

Product Capability

• Strong product discovery, facilitation and problem‑framing skills
• Confident creating product visions, strategies, roadmaps and measures of success
• Able to define complex digital products through journeys, behaviours, data, rules and acceptance criteria
• Strong backlog management and user‑story craft
• Comfortable using qualitative insight, quantitative data and experimentation to guide decisions
• Commercial awareness and the ability to distinguish clarification from scope expansion
• A sound understanding of agile product development and modern software delivery
• Enough technical understanding to collaborate credibly with Engineering and make informed trade‑offs

What We Are Looking For In You

• Clear, confident communicator, written and verbal
• Naturally curious and comfortable asking the questions others avoid
• Comfortable constructively challenging clients and stakeholders
• Able to create clarity and alignment without pretending uncertainty does not exist
• Pragmatic, evidence‑led and focused on outcomes
• Able to move between strategic thinking and detailed execution
• Self‑directed, owns their outcomes
• Calm under pressure, decisive when needed
• Competitive salary commensurate with experience
• Company pension scheme
• Company healthcare (Vitality)
• Enhanced maternity/paternity leave
• Collaborative and supportive work environment with great growth opportunities.
• Professional development and training opportunities
• 30 days of annual leave (inclusive of public holidays), plus your birthday off.