Product Manager, Global Business Review

The Economist is the leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs. We deliver our information through a range of formats, from newspapers and magazines to Apple TV/OTT apps and VR Experiences. 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.

Do you care about building the right thing more than building the thing right? Do you care about solving problems for users more than using the latest technologies or following the latest trends? Do you want to serve a clear business strategy by solving those problems?

If so you might be a good fit for The Economist’s product management team.

A strategic, inspirational and adaptable product manager is wanted who will report directly to the VP of Product. You will have the opportunity to improve the conversion rate once the customer starts the purchase flow. You will also lead the process in allowing users to manage their subscriptions and account details online, setting and executing a clear product strategy for your product based on the needs of the business, while meeting the needs of its end users. You will need to evangelise that strategy throughout the organisation.  

As the Product Manager for the Global Business Review product you will be instrumental in making our growth strategy in China work and ensure that we take a holistic approach to improving our customers’ subscription experience across product offering in China.

You will also have the opportunity to communicate with and respond to the needs of stakeholders in commercial, editorial and technology, without losing focus of your product strategy. You should be able to form hypotheses about what will benefit the business and the users based on the knowledge and ideas of yourself, the team and the wider stakeholders. You will use the results of data analytics and qualitative user research to test those hypotheses, revising or dropping them as the evidence suggests.

How you will contribute:

• Develop a product vision that meets the needs of the business while solving problems for users
• Optimise the eCommerce flow to acquire new and retain existing subscribers
• Enhance the self service area to allow customers to manage their account and subscriptions in their own time
• Optimise the single sign on experience
• Evangelise the product vision to the technical team, immediate stakeholders and organisational executives
• Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders with a firm but fair attitude
• Own the product roadmap, ensuring it balances short terms needs with strategic vision
• Mentor and pair with more inexperienced members of the team

The ideal skills for this role are:

• Fluent in both Chinese and English
• Excellence in product management, ideally with a strategic / business analysis approach
• Must be comfortable with ambiguity and understand that they are there to help define the way forward / what success looks like and communicate it
• Able to understand and prioritise technical debt / tactical work and communicate why this is important to deliver to business stakeholders
• Demonstrable experience working with cross-functional development teams
• Data driven - uses data and metrics to set experiments, prioritise and measure success
• Ability to prioritise the backlog and clearly articulate acceptance criteria
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, sometimes demanding with conflicting requirements and priorities (includes protecting the team from outside influences)
• Actively engage with the wider product community / understands & contributes to ongoing community
• Pragmatist - understand how to deliver on their vision incrementally/strategically
• Ability to think at macro and micro levels
• Articulate and clear communicator, be able to translate between engineering and business stakeholders
• Commercially minded, have a deep understanding what drives our business