Senior Product Manager

Job Band

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Office base is any main UK BBC Hub. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office/location with home working.
Salary: Up to £78,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

 
Our comprehensive benefits package includes:
 
•    An employer pension contribution of up to 10%
•    26 days’ annual leave (based on full time hours) + bank holidays and the option to buy/sell additional days
•    Contributory lifestyle benefit options including discounts at hundreds of retailers, cycle to work scheme, discounted gym memberships and healthcare schemes 
•    Employee assistance and well-being programmes
•    Learning and development tailored to your role – this could include industry recognised qualifications, coaching and mentoring
•    An inclusive and diverse environment with opportunities to join staff networks including: Women’s Network, National Disability Networks and many more.
•    Family friendly flexible working arrangements, such as hybrid working, job sharing, flexi-time and compressed hours can be requested.
 
We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and especially welcome individuals from underrepresented groups. 

We are interested in candidates currently operating at the advertised level but are also keen to help develop careers by offering opportunities where this is a step up based on current position.
 
If you require any reasonable adjustments at any time, please let us know by contacting us on Reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk with the job reference in the subject.

Job Purpose

We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to lead the work on our new machine-learning (ML) recommendations platform. 

Many users come to the BBC looking for specific content, whether that’s watching Strictly Come Dancing live; or an episode of Newscast covering the latest from Westminster. But too few users choose the BBC when they are looking to discover something less familiar. Addressing this opportunity is central to the BBC’s strategy.

Personalised ML-driven recommendations can power this necessary shift in users’ perceptions and behaviour. Through improving and expanding our recommendations, we can help users find more of our valuable content, and encourage them to use the BBC more frequently.

We‘re investing in a recommendations platform to accelerate the work of our teams building recommenders for content from across our portfolio (BBC iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport). We have three multi-disciplinary squads dedicated to the platform, and are now on the search for the right platform product manager to unlock the full potential.
 

Main Responsibilities

This role will include:

• Defining the strategy for our recommendations platform; informed by the BBC’s broader direction and driven by the opportunities to provide greater value to our end users
• Gaining an in-depth understanding of the needs of the data scientists building recommendation engines on the platform
• Forming strong partnerships with collaborators outside of our immediate team, e.g. teams responsible for providing data and getting our recommendations in front of users
• Defining and measuring success for the platform, specifically it’s contribution to accelerating our time to market and pace of innovation 
• Making the right prioritisation calls when balancing competing needs from users and the wider business
• Providing the context our platform teams need to make great decisions and build the right thing

Are you the right candidate?

To be successful in this role:

• You have at least 18 months experience working as a product manager in a multidisciplinary squad
• You have built platform products used by internal teams, including working to understand users needs and set relevant KPIs
• You have technical knowledge in at least two of these areas: (1) information retrieval, ranking, recommendations, search or marketing; (2) machine learning operations (MLOps); (3) AWS infrastructure.
• You have hands on experience conducting user research
• You can think about the big picture, synthesising many varied inputs to come up with the right plans and solutions
• You can lead a team deliver value at pace, by collaborating on the details and making tough calls when required
• You’re comfortable communicating with a broad range of colleagues, adapting your approach and language to individuals’ technical awareness and style

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants.  Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us.  Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours here.

Diversity matters at the BBC.  We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles.  The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief.  We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here.