Principal Product Manager

The Economist Group is the leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs. We deliver world-class, thought provoking content through a range of formats, from web and app, to newspapers and magazines, conferences, film and audio. What ties us together is the objectivity of our opinion, the originality of our insight and our advocacy of economic and political freedom around the world.

With a growing global subscriber base and a reputation for insightful analysis and opinion on every aspect of world events, The Economist is one of the most widely recognised and well-read current affairs publications and the foundation of our digital consumer product portfolio.

We are developing a world-class product management organisation and so have an exciting opportunity for a Principal Product Manager to lead on the overall experience of The Economists flagship mobile app. This is a rare opportunity for someone to bring their subject matter expertise to shape the product and culture at a point of real change and momentum in The Economist organisation, and to take up a leadership position for the Product and Technology business in Asia.

The Principal Product Manager will report to the VP of Customer Products.

Responsibilities:

• Lead on the overall customer experience within the mobile app - ensuring it is best in class and that all the mission based teams that contribute to the app are coordinated and strategically aligned.
• Own the relationships with partners and providers in the mobile space - Google, Apple, etc.
• Own the relationships with and integration of major app tools and SDKs- e.g. Airship, amplitude, Apptentive
• Work with a small team of engineers who will update the above SDKs and support the paywall and payments experience in the app, with focus on leveraging Apple’s updated guidelines to optimise our journeys in the US and EU.
• Lead the product agenda in Asia - working hand-in-glove with the Engineering teams to ensure we are building to modern standards and performance.
• Set and deliver metrics and KPIs for the app experience. Work with the data and insights team to ensure correct data is being captured and analysed as part of ongoing data-driven processes.
• Represent the entire App roadmap and prioritisation to senior management.
• Conversely, have a thorough understanding of priorities so that the business can achieve ‘follow the sun’ development, and there is no delay in work being done by Asia based teams.

Experience:

• Have demonstrable experience defining key customer journeys and associated optimisations of the mobile product experience, and refine them through testing and research. You will bring experience of a test-and-learn development culture. Have experience with app stores and practices around them.
• Setting clear priorities to achieve customer and business needs with the team, and rally the team around them.
• C-Level experience with communicating and presenting clearly and succinctly.
• Partnering with Editorial functions and Product Design to create intuitive and delightful content discovery.
• Partnering with engineering, design, delivery and business stakeholders to achieve an optimal product experience. Be comfortable working in close collaboration to define requirements, ideate hypotheses, develop solutions and optimise our products.
• Confidently lead and collaborate with your teams of designers, developers, QA and delivery leads, using Agile methodologies to their full potential
• Comfortable with every stage of the customer lifecycle - from ASO / acquisition, push notifications, through to conversion, and retention. Understanding the dynamic between free visitors, registered customers, and subscribers, and how critical the apps are to customer engagement and retention.

Organisation

• Reports to VP of Customer Products
• This is a senior individual contributor role, but with 4-5 squads working across the mobile space there are substantial responsibility to coordinate and direct the direction of travel
• Close working with senior functional stakeholders across a matrix structure, particularly across Product, Editorial, Technology and Data

The ideal skills for this role are:

• Builder: Someone who has built great products and user journeys that are frictionless and functional
• Listener: A great listener who can understand user and business needs
• Documenter: Someone strong on documenting user stories, use cases, workflows, requirements and dependencies
• Leader: Adept at setting strategy, evangelising the products across the organisation, leading and coaching product managers, and escalating where necessary
• Communicator: A great communicator who is able to explain their vision of what the product needs to do both to internal technology teams and cross-functional stakeholders
• Technical: Someone who can get into the tech details of a back-end platform or product to understand how to get the most out of it
• Curious: Someone who is interested in asking the right questions with the goal of producing quality results
• Humble: Someone who will seek opportunities to learn and grow your hard and soft skills through feedback and self-reflection