Role Specification: Senior Product Manager

We are recruiting for a Contract Senior Product Manager to act as the commercial and strategic anchor for a critical 10-week discovery and refinement engagement for one of our premier automotive clients. Working in a tight-knit triad alongside a Tech Lead and a User Researcher / Service Designer, you will evaluate visionary themes of lead enrichment information to build confidence in their commercial viability, desirability, and feasibility. Your primary mission is to establish data-backed recommendations on what to invest in and decompose validated concepts into an actionable feature backlog primed for executive sign-off and delivery.

Role Overview

• Role: Senior Product Manager (Contract)
  
• Location: Hybrid / Primarily remote (occasional client or team co-location as needed)
  
• Duration: 10-week discovery & refinement engagement (strong extension potential into delivery)
  
• Start Date: December
  

Our client, transitioning to a modern house-of-brands model - is redefining its customer journey across digital, retail, and operational touchpoints. Following an initial hero-journey discovery, this refinement phase is tasked with bridging high-level customer concepts with complex retail network operations, commercial feasibility, and core architecture enablers. You will steer this squad to give enterprise leadership the clarity, evidence, and confidence required to greenlight and fund delivery initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Value Validation & Viability Assessment: Build defensible business cases and ROI models for key thematic epics (such as customer preference capture, digital deal files, behavioural context, and relationship intelligence). Apply industry-standard conversion and valuation models using enterprise operational data (sales volumes, margins, configuration telemetry, and lead leakage rates) to demonstrate bottom-line impact and present clear investment recommendations to executive decision-makers.
  
• Epic-to-Feature Decomposition: Break down ambiguous, high-level business epics into structured features and testable user stories with crisp acceptance criteria. Bridge gaps between purely technical specifications and operational realities by writing user-centred requirements that balance customer experience, dealership workflows, and architectural enablers.
  
• Triad Collaboration: Partner closely with the Tech Lead (feasibility) and the User Researcher / Service Designer (desirability and usability) to build comprehensive confidence in recommendations. Ensure user research findings directly steer feature prioritisation and that technical integrations align with practical operational workflows.
  
• Squad Setup & Operational Leadership: Partner across the triad to establish squad rhythm, collaboration tooling, and documentation standards. Act as the operational delivery engine: facilitate sprint cadences (stand-ups, planning, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives), clear blockers, and sustain discovery momentum.
  
• Roadmap & Sizing Strategy: Build, size, and prioritise an actionable delivery roadmap with the team. Plan milestones against critical commercial cut-offs and sequencing priorities based on business value, dependency readiness, and technical enablement.
  
• Navigating Enterprise Governance: Guide the squad's solution concepts through formal enterprise decision gates (including Enterprise Architecture review boards, PMO checkpoints, and security/privacy governance). Partner early with enterprise architects and risk teams to secure iterative alignment and prevent downstream stage-gate delays.
  

Core Deliverables

• Comprehensive business cases, value trees, and KPI tracking frameworks for each thematic epic, directly linking technical capabilities to operational and commercial returns.
  
• Prioritised, actionable backlog (in Jira or equivalent tooling) featuring structured epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and data contract mappings.
  
• Prioritised investment roadmap sequencing validated themes by commercial return, highlighting delivery horizons, capacity requirements, and dependencies aligned to enterprise planning cycles.
  
• Governance artefact packs prepared and submitted for formal architecture, security, and enterprise decision boards.
  

Skills & Experience

• Deep expertise in product discovery, business analysis, and early-stage product strategy within complex, matrixed enterprise environments.
  
• Proven track record taking visionary, ambiguous concepts and breaking them down into structured, deliverable feature backlogs and sliced requirements.
  
• Strong commercial acumen with the confidence to deliver highly opinionated, data-backed investment proposals to executive stakeholders.
  
• Experience navigating complex enterprise governance, architecture review boards, and privacy/compliance frameworks.
  
• Familiarity with distributed franchise/dealership ecosystems, retail operations, or enterprise CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce 360) is highly advantageous.
  
• Practical, hands-on experience running agile discovery or delivery pods, with solid command of agile ceremonies and tools (Jira, Confluence).

Equal Opportunities Statement

Diversity and inclusion are hugely important to us, and we’re committed to providing equal opportunities for all. We’re actively recruiting for a diverse and inclusive workforce so want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel safe and empowered to let us know if you need any adjustments to be made to your application or interview process, so please speak to our recruitment team.

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