Product Manager (Closing date 23rd March 2025)
慨正橡扯
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Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
Qualifications
- Experience in developing and releasing digital products in an agile environment.
- Strong understanding of user needs and behaviors for product delivery.
Responsibilities
- Lead a multi-disciplinary team to improve GOV.UK publishing.
- Define and iterate product vision and strategy based on user feedback.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government — we are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.
- joining up public sector services
- harnessing the power of AI for the public good
- strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
- elevating leadership and investing in talent
- funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
- committing to transparency and driving accountability
We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.
We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.
The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.
Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.
This Product Manager role sits within the GOV.UK Publishing Service, which powers GOV.UK—the single website for UK government, serving 30 million users monthly, across 700,000+ pages.
The publishing tools and services we provide support over 2,300 civil servants in managing government content. Ensuring this publishing ecosystem is flexible, secure, and easy to use is critical to delivering accurate and timely information to the public.
Current priorities include:
- creating shared patterns and processes across our core publishing apps so they’re easier and quicker to improve, use and maintain
- modelling content to reduce duplication of effort, and enable reuse across multiple channels
- helping government colleagues self-serve to optimise the publishing process
As a Product Manager, you’ll lead a multi-disciplinary team to research, design, and deliver impactful improvements to GOV.UK publishing. You'll have the opportunity to drive productivity, efficiency, and user-centred innovation.
You may be working on building new content management tools, iterating existing tools and publishing workflows, or enhancing our APIs and developer experience to better support teams across government.
You’ll be part of a supportive product leadership environment, benefiting from:
- Line management from an experienced Senior Product Manager.
- Access to professional training and development opportunities.
- A community of 30+ product managers within GDS for peer learning.
GDS offers a wide range of career growth opportunities across other products, such as digital payments, notifications, the government-wide design system, and the new unified digital identity service.
This role supports a hybrid working arrangement, with office locations in London, Manchester, and Bristol. Most Product Managers spend 1–3 days per week in the office, with flexibility to work remotely around that.
We’re looking for someone who has a track-record of leading successful product delivery teams in an agile environment. You’ll be guided by the fundamental principles of putting user needs first, focusing on delivery and outcomes over process, and being open and collaborative. You’ll be someone who wants to make a difference, by delivering simpler, clearer and faster public services and being part of this critical publishing platform.
You'll be an experienced product person who can lead teams through the product lifecycle as they develop, run, support and continuously improve products of significant scale and complexity.
As a Product Manager, you’ll:
- work with a multidisciplinary team to deliver the product and iteratively improve it through several cycles
- develop an expert understanding of the users’ needs and behaviours, championing these in the delivery of your product
- define, explain and iterate an evidence-based product vision that is compelling to your users, team and stakeholders
- maintain a roadmap and product strategy that show your plans at different horizons and granularities
- develop and prioritise a product backlog, writing good user stories and making decisions based on evidence and value for money
- identify assumptions and risks behind possible approaches and include these in your product planning
- collaborate with team members to create prototypes or other cheap ways to test these assumptions or approaches - at both a strategic and usability level
- safely use ‘test and learn’ approaches where the cost and risks of being wrong about a particular technology choice are low
- set measurable goals for your product and report against these to demonstrate progress against stated benefits
- share insight with leadership at an appropriate time to ensure the programme strategy can adapt and have the best chance of success
- support the vision, roadmaps and delivery of other products in your programme and GDS
- consider opportunities to use data to create personalised and curated digital experiences
- engage with users and stakeholders through a range of channels to encourage take-up and use of your product
- build services following the principles in the service manual
- change your approach according to the lifecycle phase of your work
- understand, communicate, and where necessary challenge the validity of constraints
- create, curate and iterate documentation for your product
- play an active role in the government product manager community, sharing your learning and celebrating progress made by other people and teams
We’re interested in people who have:
- experience of successfully developing and releasing digital products with proficiency in agile product management techniques, such as: roadmaps; prioritisation; creation of user stories; MVP definition; using research, analytics and insight to inform decisions; planning at different horizons;
- understanding of the variety of disciplines involved in digital delivery, including engineering, content design, service design, performance analysis and user research, developed through working in multidisciplinary teams
- successfully engaged with users to improve their products, commissioning research and turning qualitative and quantitative insight into product improvements
- successfully handled a range of stakeholder relationships to successfully deliver products that meet user needs and deliver business outcomes
- reconciled strong differing opinions using evidence or user research
- evaluate return on investment/value for money on different approaches
- are familiar with setting, monitoring and reporting measurable performance objectives
- can use data and analytics to spot problems with, and evaluate success of, new features or any experiments
- can devise communication strategies and engagement plans that drive adoption at the right pace for current confidence levels
If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then don’t let that stop you from submitting an application.
The benefits of working at GDS
- flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
- a Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
- 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
- an extra day off for The King’s birthday
- an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
- career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
- paid volunteering leave
- a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
- job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
- advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
- death in service benefits
- cycle to work scheme and facilities
- access to children's holiday play schemes across different locations in central London
- access to an employee discounts scheme
- 10 learning days per year
- volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
- access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning
GDS offers hybrid working for all employees. This means that everyone does some working from home and also spends some time in their local office. You’ll agree to your hybrid working arrangement with your line manager in line with your preferences and business needs.
The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:
- a simple application screening process - We only ask for a CV and for you to answer 2 application questions
- A 75 minute video interview. This will include giving your response to a typical Product Management scenario, to help us understand and ask about your product thinking. We will assess your experience of the DDaT skills and the four Behaviours set out below.
The scenario for the interview, and instructions on how to prepare a response, will normally be sent approximately three days in advance. No presentation will be necessary, although candidates may choose to create one. Candidates can also refer to notes.
Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.
In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We’ll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.
For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:
- changing and improving
- making effective decisions
- delivering at pace
- working together
We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework for the Product Manager role:
- Agile and lean practices
- Applying user centred insights
- Creating Value for money
- Life cycle management
- Managing product outcomes
- Product leadership
- Product Management
- Stakeholder relationship management
- Strategic ownership
Candidates that do not pass the interview but have demonstrated an acceptable standard may be considered for similar roles at a lower grade.
In the event of an extremely large number of applicants, we will sift only on the criteria of “Product Management” and “Applying User Centred Insights”.
A reserve list will be held for a period of 12 months, from which further appointments can be made.
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
- UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Further information on nationality requirements
The Civil Service Code sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.
We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles.
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy.
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