Senior Product Manager job description

Product management — Senior Product Manager
Leads a complex product and raises the bar for other PMs.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Discovery
- Problem Discovery and Framing — You can frame an ambiguous or contested problem into a clear statement the team can act on, pulling in evidence from more than one source.
- Applying User-Centred Insights — You can use research findings to represent users in team discussions and help the team agree what to build next from the evidence.
- Opportunity Sizing — You can size an opportunity from first principles using more than one method, and stress-test it against a sceptical stakeholder.
- Competitor and Market Analysis — You can run market analysis for your own product unprompted and use it to argue for or against a roadmap item. You separate a competitor feature that genuinely threatens you from one that only looks impressive.
- Customer and Sales Feedback Loops — You can run the feedback loop for your product: you decide what gets captured, go back to the people who reported it, and use the themes in roadmap arguments. You notice when loud sales requests do not match usage data.

Strategy & Roadmap
- Product Strategy and Vision — You can own a product strategy end to end, use evidence to challenge whether it is still delivering its intended outcomes, and adapt it.
- Product Roadmap Prioritisation — You can sequence a roadmap across several interdependent teams, and resolve a prioritisation conflict between two credible cases.
- Product Life Cycle Management — You can judge what your product needs at its current phase and change the plan when the phase changes. You are willing to stop adding features to a mature product and spend the time on retention instead.
- Business Case and ROI Justification — You can build and present the case for a normal initiative, size the opportunity honestly, and come back later to compare the result with what you promised. You can say plainly that an idea does not pay for itself.

Product Delivery
- Specification and Acceptance Criteria Writing — You can set the specification standard your team writes to, and rescue a spec that shipped the wrong thing because it was unclear.
- Agile and Lean Delivery Practices — You can choose the delivery approach that fits a team context, and change it when it stops working.
- Backlog Refinement and Sprint Facilitation — You can keep a backlog healthy when several teams and dependencies feed it, and keep planning useful when priorities move mid-quarter. You are the one who notices that a well-groomed backlog is aimed at the wrong outcome.
- Release and Launch Management — You can plan and run a normal launch on your own, including staged rollout, the go or no-go call, and what happens if it has to be pulled back. You hold a launch when readiness is missing and explain why.
- Technical Feasibility Collaboration — You can weigh technical trade-offs with your team and choose an option knowing what it will cost you later. You can tell when a request is expensive because of the architecture rather than the feature itself.
- Design Collaboration and UX Feedback — You can run design collaboration for your product, choose between several directions, and say what the product will deliberately not do. You defend the chosen direction to stakeholders once it is settled.

Analytics & Growth
- Product Analytics and Metrics Definition — You can choose the right metrics for a product area, distinguish a vanity metric from one that predicts outcomes, and build the dashboard.
- Experiment Design and Interpretation — You can design experiments for interacting changes, spot a flawed test design before it runs, and interpret an inconclusive result honestly.
- Growth and Retention Metrics — You can choose the metrics that matter for your product, run experiments against them, and act on the result. You can tell a real retention gain from a number lifted by a one-off campaign.

Leadership & GTM
- Pricing and Packaging Input — You can propose a packaging change for a product area, back it with usage and willingness-to-pay evidence, and take it to commercial stakeholders.
- Go-to-Market Coordination — You can run go-to-market for a major product launch across multiple teams, and decide what gets cut when the timeline is at risk.
- Cross-Functional Stakeholder Alignment — You can build a stakeholder communication approach for a product area, resolve a disagreement between two stakeholders, and keep both informed.
- Executive and Board Communication — You can present your own product update to leadership, covering progress, risk and what you need from them. You deliver bad news plainly instead of burying it at the end.
- Product Team Leadership and Coaching — You can mentor one product manager through day-to-day work and give feedback they can act on this week. You walk them through how you reached a decision instead of handing them the answer.
- Cross-Team Portfolio Management — You can track the dependencies between your team and its neighbours and raise them before they bite. You go to the other team directly instead of routing everything through your manager.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) (required from Product Manager)
- Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I) (required from Product Manager)
- Pragmatic Certified Product Manager (required from Senior Product Manager)