Senior Product Manager (12-Month Maternity Cover Contract) - PLOS

PLOS is a nonprofit Open Access publisher with an ambitious mission: to help transform research communication so that science can be shared, understood, and used more effectively. We're looking for a Senior Product Manager to join our Product team for a 12-month maternity cover contract.

Research publishing is changing rapidly. Researchers' expectations are changing. Technology is creating possibilities that didn't exist a few years ago. And at PLOS, we're rethinking some of the services, systems, and assumptions that have shaped scholarly publishing for decades.

That means there are interesting product problems to solve—not just features to deliver.

You'll take responsibility for a product area and work with designers, engineers, and colleagues across PLOS to understand the problems that matter, work out where we can make the greatest difference, and help the team learn its way toward good solutions.

Although this is a fixed-term role, it isn't a caretaker role. You'll be joining active product teams working on significant problems and will have plenty of opportunity to shape what we do and how we do it.

How We Work

We want our product teams to be curious, evidence-led, and comfortable with uncertainty.

We don't expect a Product Manager to arrive with all the answers. We do expect them to ask good questions.

You'll use continuous discovery alongside delivery: spending time with users, looking at data, understanding the wider service, identifying assumptions, and finding practical ways to test them.

You'll help the team break large problems into smaller things we can learn from, rather than waiting until everything is known before we release something.

And you'll make the team's thinking visible—explaining what we're trying to achieve, what we've learned, what we're uncertain about, and why we're making the choices we are.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Product Manager, you'll:

• Understand the problem. Build a deep understanding of our users, their needs and behaviors, as well as the organizational, operational, and technical context surrounding them.
• Shape product direction. Work out where the greatest opportunities lie within your area and help translate PLOS's objectives into clear product outcomes and priorities.
• Practise continuous discovery. Work closely with design, engineering, and others to explore problems, identify assumptions, and regularly test ideas with users and through data.
• Turn uncertainty into learning. Frame hypotheses, design useful experiments, and look for the smallest sensible way to learn whether we're heading in the right direction.
• Make good product decisions. Weigh evidence, impact, effort, risk, and opportunity when deciding what to pursue—and what not to pursue.
• Measure whether things are getting better. Define useful measures of success and use qualitative and quantitative evidence to understand whether our work is having the intended effect.
• Work iteratively. Help the team deliver in small steps, learn from what happens, and adapt rather than treating plans as fixed commitments.
• Communicate your thinking. Clearly explain problems, evidence, choices, trade-offs, and learning to people with very different levels of technical and product knowledge.
• Create strong feedback loops. Use conversations, demos, reviews, and other forums to get useful feedback early rather than presenting finished thinking late.
• Work as part of a team. Create the conditions in which designers, engineers, and other specialists can contribute to product decisions rather than treating product management as something the PM does alone.
• Look beyond the product interface. Understand the wider service, including processes, systems, and teams around it, and recognize when solving a user problem requires changing more than software.

Experience and Qualifications

Essential

• Degree-level qualification or equivalent professional experience.
• At least three years experience working as a Product Manager in a multidisciplinary digital product team, working closely with disciplines such as design, engineering, research, and delivery.
• Experience using product discovery alongside delivery—for example, user research, data, experimentation, and hypothesis testing—to understand problems and inform what a team should do next.
• Experience working with significant uncertainty or ambiguity: identifying what is known, what is assumed, and what needs to be learned before making larger commitments.
• Experience taking complex problems and helping a team turn them into clear priorities, outcomes, and practical next steps.
• Experience making product decisions using a combination of user evidence, data, organizational goals, technical constraints, and product judgment.
• Experience communicating product thinking clearly to a wide range of people, including explaining evidence, uncertainty, trade-offs, and why particular decisions have been made.
• Experience working collaboratively with people outside the immediate product team, particularly where different groups have different needs, incentives, or perspectives.

Particularly Useful

We'd be especially interested in candidates who have experience of one or more of the following:

• Working in an organization going through significant product, digital, or organizational transformation.
• Working in complex service environments where improving the user experience involves changes to technology, operations, policy, or organizational processes—not simply changing an interface.
• Helping teams move toward more iterative, outcome-focused, or evidence-led ways of working.
• Working in a mission-led, research, publishing, education, scientific, or other knowledge-based organization.

Experience of scholarly publishing is useful but isn't required.

What We're Looking for in a Senior Product Manager

For us, seniority isn't about having a larger backlog or knowing more product framework: it's about judgment.

You'll be able to take a complex and uncertain problem, help people understand it, decide what we most need to learn, bring a team together around a sensible course of action, and change that course when the evidence tells us to.

You'll be comfortable making decisions without perfect information while being clear about the assumptions and risks involved.

And you'll help the people around you think more clearly about the product—not simply tell them what to build.

Working at PLOS

The role has no direct line-management responsibility.

The job is fully remote. Some flexibility to work across time zones and occasional national or international travel may be required.