Senior Product Manager

About the Position

We are seeking a Senior Product Manager for a five-month pilot with a UK programmatic media-activation partner, focusing on dependency and risk governance.

Responsibilities

Dependency and Risk Governance (the primary instrument)

• Maintain the partner onboarding critical path as a dated plan with a named owner per item - plugin agreement, integration fee, information-security questionnaire, vulnerability scan, penetration test, exposure-data access, and white-label terms.
• Track partner approvals as delivery blockers with explicit lead times, and escalate early enough that the escalation can still change the outcome.
• Keep a live risk position that distinguishes what the team controls from what it does not, and state the mitigation for each rather than logging the concern.
• Sequence work so the team is never idle waiting on a third party by keeping unblocked workstreams ready to pull forward.

Backlog and Delivery Planning

• Own the backlog and translate the milestone deliverables into work the team can actually schedule against a half-time governance load.
• Run the weekly delivery review: progress against milestones, dependency status, decisions needed, and what changed since last week.
• Protect the pilot scope from expansion, and make the cost of an accepted change visible in schedule terms before it is agreed rather than after.
• Keep the plan honest about the difference between a milestone being engineering-complete and being partner-validated.

Scope, Acceptance, and Client Coordination

• Define the acceptance criteria for each milestone in advance, including what is deliberately pilot-grade and will not be hardened in Phase 1.
• Coordinate scope, acceptance, and release demonstrations with the client, and run those demonstrations against pre-agreed criteria.
• Act as the single point of coordination between the client's commercial stakeholders and the delivery team, so that partner conversations and engineering priorities stay in step.
• Capture the decisions, open questions, and learning that the pilot generates in a form Phase 2 can use.

Requirements

Experience

• 6+ years owning delivery of technical products, including at least one engagement whose critical path ran through third-party partners rather than through the team's own backlog.
• Has run a fixed-window pilot or proof of concept to a defined acceptance bar, and can describe what was deliberately left rough and how that was agreed with the client.
• Has governed a small senior delivery team part-time, without imposing process weight the team could not absorb.
• Has managed a client relationship on time-and-materials, where scope discipline is a service to the client rather than a defence against them.
• English: strong written and spoken, C1+ effectively. The role writes the acceptance criteria, chairs the delivery review, and carries dependency escalations to commercial stakeholders.

Technical Acumen

• Can read an integration specification and an event schema, and tell whether a partner's answer actually resolves the question that was asked.
• Understands enough of event pipelines, ingestion, and reconciliation to challenge an estimate and to recognise when a dependency is being described as smaller than it is.
• Can write acceptance criteria for data correctness, not only for features, but also for what evidence proves a measurement flow works end to end.

Judgement & Soft Capabilities

• Chases a named owner and a date rather than circulating a general concern, and does it the first week the item appears rather than the week it becomes critical.
• Distinguishes a blocker from a delay and escalates the first while absorbing the second.
• Says no to scope on behalf of the client's own timeline, and can explain the trade in schedule terms rather than in process terms.
• Runs light. Chooses the two or three ceremonies that earn their place at half-time load, and drops the rest without apologising for it.
• Keeps commercial stakeholders and engineers in one conversation, translating in both directions without diluting either.
• Writes things down. On an engagement with this many external parties, the undocumented decision is the one that gets relitigated in month four.

Domain Knowledge - Required

• The programmatic supply chain in working terms: what a DSP, an SSP, a network, and a measurement provider each do, and where money and data change hands between them.
• Advertising measurement as a commercial mechanism: what a conversion is, what an attribution window does, and why the payment model determines what the data has to prove.
• Why partner integrations in this industry carry long approval paths - security review, commercial terms, data-sharing agreements - and how to plan around calendars owned by someone else.

Nice to Have

• Experience taking a pilot or proof of concept through to a productisation decision, including what evidence the decision required.
• Prior work with an affiliate or performance network, a DSP, or a measurement provider as a delivery counterpart.
• Familiarity with white-label or partner-embedded products, where another company's engine sits behind an owned surface.
• Comfort writing client-facing documentation - runbooks, acceptance packs, release notes - to a standard that survives handover.
• Experience handing a platform over to a client team to operate.

We Offer

• Contract engagement, time-and-materials, remote, with UK working-hours overlap to be confirmed.
• Half-time across an approximately five-month pilot of four milestones, at a consistent load throughout.
• Start date and rate to be agreed.

About the Project

Client: a UK audience-first programmatic media-activation partner that plans and runs advertising campaigns for brands and agencies on a managed-service basis, engaged through a delivery partner. Phase 1 is a controlled pilot with a small advertiser cohort, operated internally rather than sold as a product.

Product: a Connected TV Measurement Platform that comprises proven third-party engines behind one client-owned layer:

• An affiliate network is the distribution spine and the source of advertiser conversions, captured through a client-branded tag plugin.
• CTV buying platforms (DSPs) supply campaign exposure data.
• A specialist measurement partner performs the household exposure-to-conversion match.

The client owns the layer between them: partner integration and advertiser provisioning, conversion capture, measurement orchestration, reconciliation, and reporting. Delivery is a small team:

• Solution architect who also leads the backend build,
• Frontend engineer,
• SDET,
• DevOps engineer,

Reporting to a weekly delivery review that this role owns.

Delivery shape: four milestones - validation and foundation, platform foundation, an end-to-end measurement pilot, and hardening and launch. Each is gated by a partner dependency rather than by engineering completion, which is why dependency tracking is the primary instrument here rather than velocity.

Scope boundary: Phase 1 is conversion-only, operator-facing, and pilot-grade. Advertiser-facing access, commercial packaging, and productisation are explicitly later-phase decisions. Part of this role is holding that line while capturing what the pilot learns for whoever picks up Phase 2.