Product Manager London, England
Job description
About Faculty
Faculty is one of Europe’s leading applied artificial intelligence companies. We build, deploy and operate AI solutions to increase our customers’ performance and help them realise their full potential.
We’re perhaps best known for our award winning COVID-19 Early Warning System, that helped the NHS to manage critical supply chains during the pandemic. But our work with over 300 customers to date has delivered impact for customers right across the economy.
Faculty is at an exciting moment in our development as a business. We are launching Frontier; a market leading decision intelligence product, to sit alongside our more established consulting work.
This is an equally important time for the adoption of AI in society. Conversational AI (like GPT3) and Creative AI (like DallE and Stable Diffusion) have given a glimpse into the transformative potential of the next wave of this technology.
It is our belief that Decision AI will have impacts on a similar scale, and fundamentally change the way operational decisions are made in organisations.
Our objective is that in five years time, Frontier will be the leading software in Decision AI category.
About the role
Within the Government Practice our mission is to constantly improve the delivery of public services through the development of cutting-edge AI products which get used at scale by government organisations in the UK and beyond.
We are fortunate enough to get to work on some of the most socially impactful and important applications of AI across Government: our work includes building services to tackle the proliferation of online disinformation, to predict and prioritise patient flows in stretched A&E departments, and tools that detect key safety-related phrases in rail industry communications. We pride ourselves in using the most appropriate data science tools for the task in hand, but our expertise stretches into the very latest Large Language Models and generative AI - Faculty is OpenAI’s first technical systems integration partner and only European partner.
Excitingly, as Government has grown in its maturity for using AI, increasingly our job is to ensure that the AI we build gets deployed in mainstream digital public services that are used at scale. That requires pushing the boundaries of ensuring that excellent user research, design skills, and robust product management is applied to how AI systems get built and deployed to users.
What you'll be doing
As a Product Manager you will lead and enable multi-disciplinary teams in developing cutting-edge, safe and robustly deployable AI technology in critical government contexts.
You will be working with a very wide range of stakeholders to make sense of myriad complex needs and requirements. Your part will be to convert these into a compelling vision and a constantly evolving roadmap of prioritised problems to solve. You will lead, motivate and collaborate closely with your team to enable them to discover the most effective solutions and deliver them effectively. Teams tackling these challenges are typically made up of a product manager, a product designer, engineers, data scientists, delivery managers and commercial experts.
Your role will evolve alongside business needs as well as your personal aspirations; but you can expect your key responsibilities to include:
Working on long-running projects to build business critical systems
Lead in developing a product strategy and vision, working closely with the Client Manager and client stakeholders.
Engage and motivate the delivery/technical team to achieve the vision and work with the Client Manager to do the same with the client.
Be the go to person about the product. Ensure that the team has an in-depth and accurate understanding of all requirements, from the client’s strategic objectives, to users and their needs, to technical and feasibility requirements. Oversee, support and get hands on as needed to achieve this goal.
Proactively test/trial in a smart way: Identify assumptions and risks to success; Drive the creative process of establishing an appropriate minimum viable product in collaboration with the team.
Build and own a well-prioritised product roadmap.
Provide the right level of detail to enable the team to implement an effective solution: write briefs for discovery and delivery items, objectives and success criteria for experiments, user stories, scope of features etc.
Continually work to refine the product scope and priorities, in partnership with the Client Manager, client stakeholders and the technical team in order to deliver value early and often. Ensure that technical requirements are adequately reflected.
Be responsible for the overall product development process and proactively improve it. Be accountable for the quality and the timeliness of the continuous delivery of a gradually maturing product.
Work with the technical lead and the client manager to ensure buy-in. Support the team in working effectively together, ensuring that the work of each craft creates a coherent whole.
Conduct market and domain research relevant to your product area to ensure that our solution is leading and to advise clients on build vs. build.
Contribute to an empowered culture in the team and to team leadership by proactively surfacing issues and coming up with ideas to resolve them.
Contribute to a culture that champions user-driven approach and fosters the relevant skills among delivery and technical teams
Spot opportunities for AI solutions to become enduring software products that can be sold elsewhere
Contribute to the business unit’s product strategy, informing our view on where there are opportunities and what projects we should seek to pursue.
What we are looking for
A creative, empathetic team player who can inspire and motivate others
A can-do and proactive person who can operate in ambiguity
A great communicator with proven ability to engage with engineers, designers, data scientists, commercial leads and clients in a constructive and collaborative way.
Experience within a similar Product Manager role.
A demonstrable interest in and affinity for data-rich products.
Experience of thriving in a fast-paced work environment. Relevant experience working in Government multidisciplinary Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) teams or with Government clients, and experience of navigating service assessments will be highly beneficial
Demonstrable understanding of the techniques and methods of modern product discovery and product delivery.
Demonstrable ability to figure out solutions to hard problems with many constraints, using sound judgement to assess risks, and to lay out your argument in a well-structured, data-informed way.
Key skills
Agile working
Able to identify and compare the best processes or delivery methods to use, including measuring and evaluating outcomes. Helps the team to decide the best approach. Able to help teams to manage and visualise outcomes, prioritise work and work to agreed minimum viable product (MVP), print and scope.
Lifecycle perspective
Recognises when to move from one stage of a product lifecycle to another. Ensures the team is working towards the appropriate service standards for the relevant phase. Able to manage the delivery of products or services at different phases.
Operational management
Able to design operational processes for the running and maintenance of products or services throughout their lifecycle. Able to redesign operational processes, amend existing processes, and plan and operationalise the stages of a new product or service development. Is the escalation point for operational issues and can fix complex operational issues. Able to overcome operational constraints to deliver a successful product or service. Works closely with operational delivery teams in DDaT.
Problem ownership
Ensures that the right actions are taken to investigate, resolve and anticipate problems. Co-ordinates the team to investigate problems, and implement solutions and preventative measures.
Product ownership
Experienced in applying tools, terms and concepts in a variety of ways. Able to be flexible, consider new ways of working and adapt to change. The ability to work across different projects and products.
Strategic ownership
Able to get buy-in from the organisation. Able to work with scant information and to articulate that in abstract terms. Able to come up with a strategy.
User focus
Able to collaborate with user researchers and can sell or represent users internally. Understands the difference between user needs and desires of the user. Able to champion user research to focus on all users. Can prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so. Can offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used.
What we can offer you
The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day. This curiosity pushes us to seek truth and understanding in everything we do, to execute work in a nimble and pragmatic manner, to foster talent in one another and always to challenge assumptions.
Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to advance our goal of making artificial intelligence real. Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet. You’ll also have the opportunity to make your mark on a high-growth start-up now poised to expand internationally.
Fostering talent is one of our core values, it’s built into our culture and what we offer. Faculty was founded by people who are passionate about continuous learning, and adding value to our people.
Some of our benefits…..
Genuinely flexible working: We believe people have needs, responsibilities and interests that require something different to a strict working day. We trust people to organise and take accountability for their own work and do our best to support their lives outside Faculty. We provide you with all you need to work from home, including a laptop, keyboard, chair…even Sony headphones!
Equity, we want you to benefit from Faculty’s growth and success.
Unlimited holidays: We encourage each other to use this time to take a break, work on personal projects, or to spend time with their friends and family.
Fantastic private health, optical and dental cover, for you & your family - including 24/7 unlimited virtual private GP appointments and covering pre-existing medical conditions.
Access to mental health coaching with Sanctus
Weekly free lunches, and more fruit, drinks and snacks than you could ever eat (for office-based employees).
We work hard and make sure we enjoy what we do. So we have frequent socials and informal get-togethers to help make sure you enjoy your time with us. You’ll make friends and professional connections that will last a lifetime.
