Cloud Platform Product Manager

Ministry of Justice Digital needs an interim Product Manager for our Cloud Platform to start asap and can offer:

£450-£550 per day
a chance to work with a truly agile, empowered and co-located team of specialists at the top of their game.

Interested? Contact the Head of Product, Scott Colfer via scott.colfer@digital.justice.gov.uk

Cloud Platform

The Cloud Platform is a B2B service for the internal government market, providing a hosting, deployment and testing service built on AWS, for developers building in-house software within the justice system. It brings industry-leading tooling and continuous integration to the heart of government.

The Cloud Platform is in Beta phase, increasing its resilience and improving its service wrapper before moving into a growth phase, and needs a Product Manager that can work with the team to increase adoption.

The Ministry of Justice was amongst the first government organisations to make significant use of public cloud hosting and the Cloud Platform has been instrumental in making this change.

For more background:

the previous Product Manager talking about the value of public cloud hosting and the services offered by the Cloud Platform (blog post)
the team’s first Technical Architect talking about the MOJ’s move towards platforms and components (blog post)
our Head of Architecture talking about our use of public cloud hosting

Ministry of Justice Digital

The MOJ Digital team develops services that improve lives and is looking for product managers who want to solve tough problems.

Government digital services are a beacon of user centred design. We are looking for product managers who put users first and understand the value of defining problems before developing solutions. This means we need people who understand user research, user experience and design.

We apply a lean startup mentality at scale and need product managers who can operate in areas of extreme uncertainty by working with agility and making data driven decisions, within an empowered, co-located software team of specialists including developers, researchers, designers and stakeholders from across the justice system. We have a great culture and modern tools (like Macbooks and Google apps).

We are actively improving the diversity of our workforce in order to get the best talent available. We want our workforce to represent the variety of people in the UK population and do not discriminate based on age, sex, pregnancy or family commitments, disability, race or religion.

Life’s too short not to do something important so join a team with a mission to improve millions of lives.

The products

MOJ Digital has a diverse portfolio of products to suit a wide range of product management skills:

software for the public like visit someone in prison
software for internal users like our intranet
platforms and APIs to help build our software like the cloud platform.

We are a mature software development studio, increasingly building services with both public and professional user interfaces, built on top of our APIs and cloud platform.

The role

As Senior Product Manager you will be an experienced product manager leading a multidisciplinary team, supporting and continuously improving products of significant scale and complexity. You will take products through discovery, alpha, beta and live phases of development with the goal of making government services simpler, easier and faster to use. You will devise and iterate the product roadmap and backlog, be a champion for user needs, document product knowledge, and communicating plans and progress through various channels including the blog, stakeholder meetings and demos. You will also be an active part of the broader product management community, coaching and managing Associate Product Managers and Product Managers, supporting the quality assessment of your colleagues’ products, and sharing learning and new techniques with the community.

As a Senior Product Manager for for MOJ Digital you will work with other delivery agencies within the justice system, central government departments, and the wider public sector to transform public services.

Senior Product Managers at MOJ Digital lead work on exciting products in support of services that improve lives. It is an opportunity to work with committed and talented user researchers, developers, designers, analysts, agile specialists and content teams who share a vision for making better government through smarter use of technology.

Skills and experience

We’re looking for an individual with strong interpersonal skills who likes working in a delivery focused, agile environment with multi-disciplinary teams. We’re looking for someone who prides themselves on representing users, is comfortable with technical detail, and enjoys the challenge of promoting the products they are working on.

It’s essential you have:

Product ownership: you are an expert in product management, using a range of techniques to work with a multidisciplinary team and translate user needs into deliverables
User focus: you understand users (who they are, what their needs are, how they behave and how they change over time) and deliver products and services that meet these needs
Problem ownership: you take a problem statement and can work with a multidisciplinary team to validate the problem, refining it and narrowing its focus until it becomes feasible and valuable to solve
Strategic ownership: focussed on benefits (not features), you develop ambitious visions and strategies and are able to get organisational buy-in and translate them into deliverable goals
Experience of working with agility: you are aware of the Agile Manifesto and how it applies in government and act as a champion for working with agility and learning from your users and your mistakes
Product lifecycle perspective: you have experience of the full product lifecycle and can lead a team through each stage, continuing to meet user needs by iterating your product (this includes live support and incident response).

It is desirable that you have:

Financial ownership: you can prioritise spending based on return on investment and are able to secure funding for new products through creation and pitching of a business case
An understanding of government constraints: you are able to develop an understanding of policy, legislative, regulatory and operational constraints, adapting products where needed.
Knowledge of the digital economy: you are aware of the varieties of digital contexts and design service to fit them, keeping up to date with new technologies and their potential use.