The Vacancy

As a business, Hermes is driven by our four values of; Do the right thing, Dare to be different, Strive for more and Be customer obsessed.  It’s because of these values that we are the UK’s leading consumer delivery service handling over 630 million parcels per year and still growing and our IT team help to drive that growth.

Hermes has undergone a significant transformation moving from a parcel-centric business to a customer-focused business.  There continues to be significant investment into IT realising Hermes’ vision of being a digital business with data being a significant enabler for the Hermes Business Strategy.

As a result of our continued growth, the Hermes Product Innovation & Client Onboarding team have a brand new role for a  Product Manager.

Overview: 

We’re the UK's leading consumer delivery specialist, and that’s because we’re obsessed about providing our customers with the ultimate delivery experience. We run our business with customers at the heart and this is reflected in our drive towards a product centric organisation. We’re currently looking for a Product Manager to craft and join us on this exciting journey as we look to expand the depth and breadth of our product portfolio across our five key value streams: customer, client, courier, business and operations.

A Product Manager at Hermes will have full ownership of one or more products in a value stream, managing them from concept to retirement, cultivating and driving value from them. They will be accountable in ensuring these delivers against clearly defined objectives and key results (OKRs) aligned to the company’s vision. As the ultimate decision maker of their product plans, they will prioritise the backlog to deliver the highest outcome.

The Product Manager will typically immerse themselves in product analytics and work with business stakeholders, customers, UX, technical product delivery and Analysts on a daily basis to understand key problems and challenges faced. They will be responsible for working with their product-aligned team to define the outcomes and ideate ‘how’ to solve these problems and create business value.

They will work closely with the Technical Product Owner and product-aligned squads to identify ‘what’ gets delivered and ‘when’. They will continuously challenge and validate against outcomes, leveraging user focus groups and product analytics, and will rebalance and course correct where needed.

Product Managers will need to liaise with multiple functions, from finance to marketing, and must be confident in communicating, with strong influencing and negotiation skills. They are experienced in working with colleagues up to senior management level and motivate delivery teams with clear, elevating goals to convey the product vision and make the team feel personally and emotionally invested.

Product Managers are passionate about creating great products and they have good understanding of their product ecosystem and industry it operates in, including knowledge of the customers, the market, the competition and future trends.

This role will carry out some or all of the following activities: 

Product Development Lifecycle:

• Deliver and sometimes define the product vision in collaboration with senior leadership aligned to the enterprise strategy and convey that vision to delivery teams.
• Accountable for ensuring product OKRs (L2) are met and contribute to the wider product strategy and higher level OKRs (L1, L0).
• Manage one or more product(s) across the full product lifecycle and ensure problems and needs of customers are identified and bridged.

• Problem Definition
  • Act as the interface with business stakeholders to frame the problem and channel emerging ideas.
  • Continuously look at analytics to derive customer, product and market insights.
  • Liaise with Data Analysts, UX Researchers and senior team members to articulate the key drivers for change.
• Ideation
  • Facilitate workshops with product-aligned squad and product team members to define realistic product outcomes.
  • Bring knowledge and understanding of the end user, competitors, the industry and future trends to ideation sessions.
  • Link with Design and Technology functions to ensure ideas satisfy overarching principles and alignment across the product estate with a consistent UX.
• Continuous Discovery
  • Ensure ideas are constantly being assessed and validated, to adapt, pivot & evolve.
  • Collaborate with UX Researchers to conduct UX assessments, surveys and end user focus group sessions to validate hypotheses before pursuing with development.
  • Liaise with the Enterprise BA and Solution Architect to validate the desired solution fits within the overall technology and business landscape.
• Continuous Delivery
  • Own the product roadmap striving to deliver product increments from a Minimal Marketable Product and further iterations across the product lifecycle.
  • Own and prioritise product backlog working with Solution BAs to ensure requirements are accurately captured and understood by the Delivery Team.
  • Work closely with the Product Delivery Manager to ensure the right features are shipped and delivered on time.
  • Liaise with design and technology stakeholders to ensure alignment across Hermes’ IT estate.
  • Work with Programme Mangers and change enabling resources to identify product impacts for cross-cutting projects (e.g. GDPR, Brexit, IT scaling, Infra Optimisations).
• Continuous Measurement & Validation
  • Monitoring input and output metrics to validate and measure objectives.
  • Derive product usage insights and market impact from analytics and MI data.
  • Report on the products value and behaviour.
  • Define product SLA/SLOs.

• Provide clarity to the department on the prioritisation of enhancements, new features, service and technical debt, so that all staff members can deliver the best value to the business and manage risk appropriately.

Product Management

• Responsible to define and report product metrics that represent progress against goals and strategic vision.
• Demonstrate evidence and rationale for decisions to evolve, pivot or stop products.
• Budgeting for product iterations (CAPEX, OPEX), planning KPIs and resource allocation.
• Support on managing financial risk associated with the product set including licence management, supportability and maintenance.
• Support marketing and business stakeholders on product launch and go to market strategy.
• Work with key stakeholders, customers, suppliers and third parties to ensure required service levels and quality is maintained.
• Collaborate with Change Management teams to enable new ways of working and product adoption across the organisation where applicable.
• Liaise with stakeholders at all levels to ensure clear alignment around product expectations.

Knowledge & Experience:

• 4+ years’ experience as a Product Manager or equivalent is desirable
• Experience working in a product-centric organisation
• Proven skills of balancing technical knowledge with business acumen
• Proactive in understanding key trends in industry, users and competitors
• IT proficient to understand new product trends and technologies
• Excellent understanding of software development processes; Agile/DevOps
• Business understanding of Product lifecycle management including product launch, finances (budgets, cost and ROI), product retirement

Technical & People Skills:

• Defining and managing product OKRs, KPIs and other metrics
• Able to work with analytics tools to generate insights and reports
• Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills
• Creative thinker able to articulate a vision and drive end-user centricity
• Customer obsessed with strong drive to optimize products
• Effective stakeholder communication and collaboration skills
• Experience using Product Management tools (e.g. Monday.com, Asana, Craft.io, Airfocus, ProdPad, Roadmunk, Jira/Confluence, etc)