Job Description
Solace is a leading London based Design and Technology Agency that partners with ambitious companies to help them gain competitive advantage and disrupt their target markets. We know the key to success for our clients is building user-centric products that solve real-world problems. As the primary client contact, ideal product managers will have experience consulting on product roadmaps, defining user stories, working through UX problems, managing design/development teams and product timelines. You should be a quick learner with strong communication skills and can work with a diverse range of people internally and externally. Working across multiple products, you should be able to balance time input to ensure each product trajectory is met and client satisfaction is kept high.
As the principal product manager, the ideal candidate will have access to managing products at different stages of the life cycle. The role will be diverse from early inception to scaling after product-market fit across multiple vertical markets. The ideal candidate should be comfortable adapting to the requirements of each client account.
Objectives for this role:
- Represent Solace and the design/development teams to clients daily, ensuring our capabilities are articulated and deployed effectively.
- Help clients meet product key performance indicators by analysing user feedback, understanding stakeholder needs, looking at the long-term vision and prescribing a product roadmap that helps to achieve goals.
- Define and prioritize product backlogs to meet the commercial and user requirements for clients’ products
- Set design sprint cadence and timelines, agreed with stakeholders and designers to keep output in alignment with the product backlog.
- Work with stakeholders to find a balance between the Solace team with their internal teams, ensuring roles/responsibilities are clearly defined.
- Support clients with scientific-based user testing through A/B tests to gather measurable data that helps influence the product roadmap
- Help Solace improve and productise product management processes to ensure swift onboarding of client accounts.
- Ensure each account is on budget, with the correct resource level provided to meet the client’s expectations and be commercially viable for Solace
- Establishing/maintaining excellent relationships with clients and other professionals. Liaising with customer success and HR to ensure all parties are happy in the workplace.
- Spotting up-sell opportunities on ongoing retainers and fixed projects and flagging those with sales to ensure accounts can grow to their full potential
Day-to-day responsibilities:
- Managing your designers and developers, every morning you will participate in the morning stand-up to keep the team on track. You will have frequent check-in calls to ensure work is completed on time, to a high quality and in alignment with client expectations.
- Planning, maintaining product backlogs with timelines and resource allocation. Defining tickets, user stories and requirements.
- Client management, frequently liaising with clients live in refinement, sprint demos and deep dive sessions. Maintaining async communication over Slack (internal/external) and email.
- Product consulting, advising clients on best practices for product development, sharing frameworks and completing product-related deliverables
- Tracking, ensuring project cadence is maintained and the project burn rate is within budget. Designers/devs are on track to deliver by sprint demos.
- Reporting, both in writing and in meetings, you will report on the status of all deliverables and results in context of the success criteria defined by you and the client.
Your skills:
- Understanding of Agile SCRUM methodology. Experience working in an agile environment with SCRUM master and product owner.
- Understanding of the UX design process. Familiarity with design sprints and the UX double diamond methodology.
- Proven experience in managing complex digital projects with multiple stakeholders and full-cycle design and development.
- Agency-side experience with the proven capability of juggling multiple projects at once
- Obsessed with detail, have good logical, sound analytical and numerical capabilities.
- Familiar with lean startup principles to create value and shorten development cycles. Previous usage of the lean validation board and business model canvas
- Understanding of product management frameworks such as jobs-to-be-done, north star framework, customer journey maps and the hooked method.
- Ability to solve complex problems and be solution-oriented at all times
- Ability to cut through the noise with multiple viewpoints, ideas, approaches and methods to the problem. Intake ideas and output a well-aligned approach.
- Technical project management experience in end-to-end development cycles. Working through technical constraints, ensuring the DevOps process is adhered to and conducting quality assurance of all work.
- General understanding of Continuous Integration DevOps pipelines: dev, staging, prod, live.
- General understanding of front-end web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- General understanding of full-stack javascript: React, React Native, NodeJS, MySQL.
Experience/Soft skills:
- Bachelor’s degree or at least 3 years of relevant work experience in-house or agency side
- Strong communication and empathy skills
- Creative and, above all, proactive mindset
- Passion for tech, products and making a significant impact through digital solutions
Our PM stack:
- Asana. The single source of truth for all projects. The product backlog, files, meeting notes and team members are all stored here.
- Slack. Internal channels for operations, DMs with team members and shared client channels to communicate externally.
- Figma. Where all project design deliverables are worked on collaboratively and stored for quick access from anyone internally or client-side
- Notion. A wiki for all our product management processes
- GitHub. Where code is deployed continuously and version control is maintained
Types of clients/projects:
Clients
- Ambitious funded startups
- VC-funded startups: Seed – Series B
- Looking to get their product to a market-leading standard
- Hit product KPIs needed for the next round of investment
- Founder-led product departments
- SMEs looking for exponential growth
- Existing successful core service-based business
- Looking for exponential growth through a scalable product
- Looking to productise offering and launch web/mobile app
- Governments staying ahead of the curve
- Gov organisations looking to innovate their digital experiences
- Stay competitive with the private sector and industry
- Engage digital transformation to increase customer adoption
- Incubate new ideas and go-to-market
