Product Management Lead

About us

At National Grid, our commitment to a cleaner, greener energy future is powered by the dedication and ingenuity of our people. Join our team as a Product Management Lead and be a part of something bigger—where your unique skills and passions can make a real difference. Together, we are superpowered. 

National Grid is hiring a Product Management Lead on a permanent basis. This position is based in Warwick. This role operates under a hybrid working model. Hybrid work expectations are subject to business needs and company policy.  

About the role

As Product Management Lead, you'll create explicit ownership of product outcomes, value and lifecycle decisions across a federated operating model. This is a practice leadership role rather than a role managing an individual product: the postholder owns a single product management framework and a single discovery framework that every product line adopts, so that products run in different lines of business are managed, evidenced and assured to one consistent standard.

What you'll do

Product management framework and taxonomy

• Own and publish a single product management framework for our federated operating model: the lifecycle stages every product passes through, the decision gates at each stage, and the artefacts a team must produce to pass them. Review and reissue it annually.
• Maintain the product taxonomy and the product portfolio and ownership map across every line of business, so that each product has a named owner, a defined boundary and a current lifecycle status.
• Run a quarterly assurance review of product teams against the framework, publish the findings, and agree remediation actions with each Product Line Director.

Discovery framework and investment artefacts

• Own a single discovery framework used by every product line, covering problem framing, user research, opportunity sizing and experimentation.
• Define the artefact set discovery must produce before investment is approved — the financial case, the architectural impact and option assessment, the benefits profile, the dependency map and the capability requirements — and set the quality bar for each.
• Review the evidence pack for every major product investment ahead of sanction and advise the Head of Product, in writing, whether it meets the bar and where the gaps are.
• Assess capability requirements holistically across the organisation, so that the people, skills, platform and partner capacity implied by the portfolio are visible as one picture, and flag where lines of business are competing for the same scarce capability.

Value, performance and lifecycle decisions

• Publish product scorecards each quarter covering adoption, cost to serve, user satisfaction and benefit realisation against the approved case.
• Chair the quarterly value review and recommend continue, change or retire decisions for products that are not delivering their intended outcomes.

Capability, career pathway and hiring

• Own the product management career pathway and capability framework, including role profiles, capability levels and the assessment criteria used at interview.
• Act as hiring standard-setter for product roles: assure interview panels and agree the assessment approach with HR and Talent Acquisition.
• Run the product management community of practice across the federated lines of business, including onboarding for new product managers and a continuing development curriculum.

Tooling

• Own the product tooling landscape covering roadmapping, discovery, user insight and value tracking, including selection, licensing, cost and adoption, and retire duplicated tooling.

Leadership and collaboration

• Line manage the product practice team, setting objectives, managing performance and developing capability.
• Partner with the Solution Architecture, Engineering Enablement and Delivery Orchestration Leads so that product, design, engineering and delivery standards form one coherent operating model.
• Deputise for the Head of Product on product matters as required.

About you

• Extensive product management experience in a complex, technology-enabled organisation, with a clear and defensible view of what good product practice looks like and why.
• Proven track record of defining and embedding product management standards, frameworks and taxonomies across multiple teams, rather than running a single product.
• Experience of defining hiring standards and capability frameworks for product roles, including career pathways and structured assessment.
• Deep practical knowledge of discovery and product research methods, and the ability to codify them into a framework teams will actually use.
• Experience of selecting, governing and driving adoption of product tooling across an organisation.
• Experience of assuring practice standards and measuring maturity, with the judgement to know when to enforce and when to coach.
• A good understanding of financial management, benefits management and realisation linked to business results.
• A good understanding of current and emerging product methods, agile methodologies and trends.
• Ability to successfully operate at a senior manager level, forming strong relationships and engagement as needed across all levels of the Business Entity.
• Experience of working within a heavily matrixed organisation, with the ability to drive for results through influence.

What you'll get

• Competitive Salary, based on capability and experience
• Bonus of up to 30% based on personal and company performance

Additional benefits:
 

• A competitive contributory pension scheme where we will double match your contribution to a maximum company contribution of 12%
• Flexible benefits such as a cycle scheme, share incentive plan, technology schemes
• Access to apps such as digital GP service for round the clock access to GP video consultations and NHS repeat prescriptions, wellbeing app to support your health and fitness
• Access to Work + Family Space, providing support and resources for work and family life, including paid emergency childcare and eldercare

More Information

The closing date for this vacancy is 16th November. However, we encourage candidates to submit their applications as early as possible and not to wait until the published closing date. National Grid’s recruitment periods can and may vary. We reserve the right to remove this advert or close it to further applications at any point during the recruitment process. 

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