Product Manager - HMRC - G7

Location

Edinburgh Regional Centre - Queen Elizabeth House
Manchester Regional Centre - Three New Bailey
Newcastle Upon Tyne - Benton Park View
Worthing - Teville Gate House

Please note that due to workforce controls, Newcastle is only available to existing HMRC staff in this location.

About the job

Job summary

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We are recruiting 3 Product Managers at HMRC Business Tax (EEITTs & Specialist Tax team). The team is a specialist product and service group within HMRC’s Chief Digital Product Office (CDPO), responsible for supporting a diverse portfolio of tax regimes that underpin key areas of UK revenue collection. EEITTs/Specialist Tax covers a broad set of services and systems that enable HMRC to administer and collect taxes such as excise duties, environmental levies, insurance premium taxes, transport related, and specialist taxes. These services are often complex, highly regulated, and operationally critical, supporting both customer compliance and HMRC’s assurance activities.

The team brings together product, service, delivery, and business analysis capabilities to manage the end to end lifecycle of these services, ensuring they are stable, secure, and aligned to policy and legislative requirements, while also driving modernisation and improvement. A key focus of the EEITTs/Specialist Tax team is transforming legacy tax services onto strategic platforms (such as ETMP), reducing operational risk, improving data integrity, and enabling more efficient and scalable tax administration across multiple regimes.

HMRC is made up of Customer Groups which are working independently towards one common goal. Our role sits within HMRC’s Chief Digital & Information Office (CDIO) Group that deliver in-house solutions for a broad range of technical and operational issues. Our digital delivery centres are hi-tech, state-of-the-art facilities that allow our teams to maximise their capabilities.

Job description

A Product Manager is responsible for ensuring that a product is of high quality and delivers value. They manage their products through various phases of the product lifecycle, from discovery, development and build, to live running. They balance the goals of the organisation with the needs of end users, and the skills of the product team to scope and build the right products and prioritise how to iterate them over time. Additionally, they may be involved in recruiting and managing personnel within the product team, ensuring they hire the right individuals that are supported, and developed.

Key Responsibilities:

• Set the product vision, strategy and scope: Define how the product will work to support the organisation or service’s goals and set the scope for what the product will initially do as an MVP, to how it will continually improve or the organisation and end user needs change for a large product or service.
• Stakeholder management: Engage with stakeholders to understand their goals from the service and product, secure their buy-in for the product vision and roadmap, and maintain good working relationships, including managing negotiations over the scope and timelines for product development.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary product teams: Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team, which could include user researchers, service designers, business analysis, and software engineers, to shape and build the product.
• User Insight Integration: Work with performance analysts and user researchers to gather customer insights on products for iteration and improvement.
• Develop and maintain the roadmap prioritise the order in which high level features and functionality is built and released, based on what is most valuable to build first, and communicate this through road mapping.  Get buy in for the roadmap from key stakeholders and maintain the roadmap, prioritising and adding enhancements to the product over time to continually improve the product.
• Develop and maintain the backlog: Identify the team tasks (“user stories”) to build the functionality on the roadmap and create a backlog of user stories. Implement the relevant processes such as sprint planning or Kanban, so the team is regularly working through the backlog to build and release features and maintain the backlog to a high-quality standard.
• Build and maintain products to a high-quality standard: Collaborate with colleagues such as designers, user researchers, BAs or engineers to create products that are highly reliable, usable, and accessible for users with accessibility needs, in line with the government service standards.
• Track and improve product performance: Product managers should be able to define how the product will support the organisation’s goal, how that success will be measured (by defining the objectives and key results), and measure progress against these. They should be able to identify improvements and iterations based on feedback to make products more successful.
• Option Evaluation: Collaborate with area leads to assess development options for products or services, including high-level financial implications.
• Community Engagement: Actively participate in the product management community of practice through initiatives, sessions, talks, or activities that help other product managers.
• Support and develop other product managers: this can be through line management, coaching or mentoring more junior product managers or supporting peers.

Candidates who are offered the role will be judged as performing successfully if:

• they are regularly and sustainably delivering product features to the timelines initially negotiated
• if there are stakeholder satisfaction and alignment around the product vision and roadmaps
• if the product is meeting quality standards
• and finally, if they are positively contributing to both their teams and the wider profession community.

Person specification

Key Responsibilities:

• Set the product vision, strategy and scope: Define how the product will work to support the organisation or service’s goals and set the scope for what the product will initially do as an MVP, to how it will continually improve or the organisation and end user needs change for a large product or service.
• Stakeholder management: Engage with stakeholders to understand their goals from the service and product, secure their buy-in for the product vision and roadmap, and maintain good working relationships, including managing negotiations over the scope and timelines for product development.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary product teams: Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team, which could include user researchers, service designers, business analysis, and software engineers, to shape and build the product.
• User Insight Integration: Work with performance analysts and user researchers to gather customer insights on products for iteration and improvement.
• Develop and maintain the roadmap prioritise the order in which high level features and functionality is built and released, based on what is most valuable to build first, and communicate this through road mapping.  Get buy in for the roadmap from key stakeholders and maintain the roadmap, prioritising and adding enhancements to the product over time to continually improve the product.
• Develop and maintain the backlog: Identify the team tasks (“user stories”) to build the functionality on the roadmap and create a backlog of user stories. Implement the relevant processes such as sprint planning or Kanban, so the team is regularly working through the backlog to build and release features and maintain the backlog to a high-quality standard.
• Build and maintain products to a high-quality standard: Collaborate with colleagues such as designers, user researchers, BAs or engineers to create products that are highly reliable, usable, and accessible for users with accessibility needs, in line with the government service standards.
• Track and improve product performance: Product managers should be able to define how the product will support the organisation’s goal, how that success will be measured (by defining the objectives and key results), and measure progress against these. They should be able to identify improvements and iterations based on feedback to make products more successful.
• Option Evaluation: Collaborate with area leads to assess development options for products or services, including high-level financial implications.
• Community Engagement: Actively participate in the product management community of practice through initiatives, sessions, talks, or activities that help other product managers.
• Support and develop other product managers: this can be through line management, coaching or mentoring more junior product managers or supporting peers.

Candidates who are offered the role will be judged as performing successfully if:

• they are regularly and sustainably delivering product features to the timelines initially negotiated.
• if there are stakeholder satisfaction and alignment around the product vision and roadmaps.
• if the product is meeting quality standards.
• and finally, if they are positively contributing to both their teams and the wider profession community.

Essential Criteria

• Demonstration of strong stakeholder management and communication skills, including experience of building and maintaining positive stakeholder relationships.
• Experience of leading a product team or project team to deliver its stated outcomes.
• Ability to define and adapt product scopes based on new insights.
• Experience of understanding problems within a service, product or process, and finding a positive solution to resolve the issue.
• Demonstration of the ability to look across a number of products/services in a portfolio, and the wider marketplace, to understand how different products can work together to deliver a wider outcome.
• Experience of being able to prioritise work based on what is valuable to do first and getting buy in from stakeholders for any associated project plans/ rollout plans/ roadmaps.
• Experience of coaching, mentoring and line managing others across a digital team in product management roles or other GDaD roles.
• Experience in backlog management and prioritisation.
• Ability to collaborate with other professions and skillsets, particularly in digital product contexts. Skills in accessibility compliance and the ability to ensure products meet necessary standards.
• Experience of building capability in others and facilitating learning and development at scale, including of product management frameworks and tools.
• Research and analytical skills to assess user feedback and integrate insights into product development.

Desirable Criteria

• Knowledge of user research, or service or interaction design, or software engineering practices, and how to apply them to design better products.
• Prior experience of working on digital services.
• Prior experience of agile working.
• Experience of managing junior staff members.
• Certification in agile or product management may be advantageous.
• Working knowledge of ITIL v4.

Further Location Information

Please ensure that you only apply for a location that you are willing and able to work from, as we will only make one offer of employment. Any additional notes included in a ‘Further Location Preferences (optional)’ field within the application form, will not be considered. Please be aware that you cannot change your location preference after submitting your application.

Office closures

For more information on where you might be working, review this information on our locations.

If your location preference is for the following site, it’s important to note that this is not a long-term site for HMRC and we will require you to move to a new building in the future, subject to our location strategy and the applicable employee policies at that time.

These sites are:

• Benton Park View, Newcastle - moving to Pilgrims Quarter, Newcastle

You will be given more information about what this means at the job offer stage.