Principal Product Manager (Lead)

Job Description

The ideal candidate is a senior product leader who can operate confidently at both strategic and execution levels. They are comfortable influencing senior stakeholders, making prioritisation decisions across competing demands, and creating structure without slowing delivery. They bring credibility through deep product management experience, consulting discipline, and strong pre-sales and solutioning expertise, with the ability to shape client problem statements, develop compelling solution approaches, and connect business goals with practical delivery outcomes. They also have the maturity to work across public and private sector contexts, where governance, risk, value, and stakeholder complexity may differ.

The role holder is responsible for leading a portfolio of products or strategic product initiatives to deliver measurable business value, strong client outcomes, and scalable product practices across teams. This role combines product leadership, portfolio prioritisation, operating model design, governance, analytics, and executive engagement. They are also expected to bring thought leadership, mentor teams, and contribute to organisation-wide product management best practices.

What will you do:

• Lead portfolio delivery and maximise impact
• Lead a portfolio of products, product streams, or strategic initiatives from planning through delivery and value realisation.
• Ensure product teams are focused on solving the highest-value problems for users, clients, and the business.
• Translate strategic priorities into clear product outcomes, roadmaps, and delivery plans across multiple squads.
• Drive alignment between business objectives, user needs, delivery capacity, and technical feasibility.
• Monitor whether delivered initiatives achieve intended outcomes, and intervene when priorities, scope, or execution need adjustment.
• Balance short-term delivery commitments with long-term product sustainability, platform health, and strategic growth.
• Guide teams to move beyond feature delivery and maintain focus on measurable impact, adoption, and product performance.
• Establish product operating model and governance across squads; scale product discovery and measurement
• Define, implement, and continuously improve the product operating model across squads to ensure consistency, clarity, and accountability.
• Establish clear governance mechanisms for product planning, decision-making, prioritisation, dependency management, and escalation.
• Clarify roles, responsibilities, and decision rights across product, engineering, design, delivery, architecture, and business stakeholders.
• Standardise core product management practices such as discovery, roadmap planning, backlog management, experimentation, and outcome tracking.
• Scale effective product discovery practices so squads consistently validate user needs, business value, and solution assumptions before delivery.
• Ensure squads use suitable measures of success, including discovery metrics, delivery indicators, adoption measures, and value outcomes.
• Promote disciplined yet practical governance that enables speed, transparency, and quality decision-making rather than unnecessary process.
• Shape investment and prioritisation across a portfolio; influence executive stakeholders
• Lead portfolio-level prioritisation by assessing strategic fit, value potential, cost, risk, dependency, and execution readiness.
• Develop structured business cases, investment proposals, and prioritisation recommendations for senior leadership review.
• Work with executives and cross-functional leaders to align investment decisions with enterprise goals, client priorities, regulatory considerations, and delivery realities.
• Support trade-off discussions where funding, resources, timelines, or business priorities are constrained.
• Communicate portfolio choices, sequencing logic, and expected outcomes in a clear and credible manner to senior stakeholders.
• Influence decision-making through evidence, market insight, user understanding, and commercial judgement.

• Define product analytics strategy and value realisation system
• Establish a product analytics approach that supports decision-making at squad, product, and portfolio levels.
• Define and implement value realisation frameworks using OKRs, product health metrics, adoption measures, customer outcomes, operational indicators, and commercial impact metrics where relevant.
• Ensure product teams have clear baselines, targets, and review cadences to track whether products are delivering intended value.
• Partner with data, engineering, and business teams to improve access to quality data and strengthen product insight capability.
• Use analytics to identify opportunities, underperformance, risks, and improvement actions across the portfolio.
• Create regular reporting and review mechanisms for leadership to assess progress, product health, and return on investment.
• Promote a culture of evidence-based decision-making and continuous learning.
• Provide thought leadership and shape organisational best practice
• Act as a senior product leader who brings strong point of view, practical experience, and market-informed thinking to improve product management maturity across the organisation.
• Contribute to development of product frameworks, standards, governance models, and playbooks.
• Coach and mentor product managers and cross-functional teams to strengthen product capability and consistency of practice.
• Share lessons learned, emerging trends, and proven approaches to improve how teams deliver product outcomes.
• Support leadership in building a stronger product culture and embedding best practice across business and delivery teams.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate should possess:

• More than 15 years of experience across product management and consulting , including leadership responsibility for complex products, portfolios, or transformation initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience leading product strategy, delivery, and value realisation across multiple squads or business domains.
• Proven experience in project and product delivery in both government and commercial environments .
• Strong experience in portfolio prioritisation, business case development, investment shaping, and executive stakeholder management.
• Experience designing or improving product operating models, governance structures, and scalable product practices.
• Hands-on experience in product discovery, roadmap management, experimentation, and outcome measurement.
• Strong track record in defining and using OKRs , product health metrics, and analytics to drive product decisions and business outcomes.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams including engineering, design, architecture, data, operations, and senior business stakeholders.
• Proven experience in pre-sales and solutioning , including shaping client problem statements, developing product and delivery approaches, contributing to proposals and business cases, and presenting solution recommendations to senior stakeholders

Relevant Certifications:

• Product management certification is required . Examples may include recognised certifications in product management, product ownership, or digital product leadership.
• Agile, Scrum, Lean, or related delivery certifications are advantageous.

Additional Information

We are driven by our AEIOU beliefs—Adventure, Excellence, Integrity, Ownership, and Unity—and we seek individuals who embody these values in both their professional and personal lives. We are committed to our Impact: Valuing our clients, Growing our people, and Creating our future.

Together, we make the extraordinary happen.

Learn more about us at ncs.co and visit our LinkedIn career site.

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