Product Manager

Product Manager

Are you looking for a hands-on product role at a media-tech business working with Apple and publishers including The Athletic, The Atlantic, News UK and The Telegraph?

We’re FlatPlan, a software company helping news orgs deliver content to millions of people. We’re a preferred provider to Apple, working with hundreds of publishers to help them grow audience and revenue.

We’re hiring a Product Manager to turn our customer needs into a clear, prioritised product vision, shaping our roadmap to aid publishers in a rapidly changing media landscape. The role combines product management and product ownership. Technical direction sits with our Engineering Manager and Lead Engineer.

Your Role

You’ll take day-to-day ownership of product work, from understanding a customer problem through to release and measurement of impact.

You’ll work closely with our Founder and CEO, our Chief of Staff, our Engineering Manager and our publisher strategy team. You’ll turn findings and ideas into clear priorities, bringing customer insight and practical judgement to decisions about what we build next.

Our product function is still taking shape. Ideas come from across the business and across our large customer base, and we need someone who can bring them together, ask the right questions, keep delivery moving and learn from past product releases.

How we work on product

• Customer insight: You’ll hear directly from publishers and work with our Customer Success, Client Strategy and Support teams, who understand their goals and day-to-day challenges.
• Close collaboration: You’ll own the product backlog and engineering owns the delivery and sprint backlog. Our Engineering Manager, Andrew, leads the engineering team. You’ll work with him and the product engineers to agree what we can deliver, in what order, and where we need to make trade-offs, including an agreed allowance for other technical work.
• Whole experience: Our customer dashboard needs to feel coherent as features are added. You’ll consider the full user journey alongside individual requests.
• Practical AI use: AI is core to how our team works. We expect fluency and curiosity - candidates are expected to have experience with connectors/plugins, automations and a deep interest in the use of AI to help humans do their best work.
• Agile ceremonies: You’ll take part in sprint planning and run refinement and sprint review. That means writing user stories and acceptance criteria that engineers can deliver against, helping size the work, and playing back what was delivered to stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Discovery: Gather customer and team input, understand the problem behind a request and test assumptions before committing engineering time.
• Intake and triage: All product requests come through you. Design the intake process, triage what comes in and keep requesters informed.
• Prioritisation: Own and maintain a clear backlog and delivery plan, weighing customer impact, business priorities and engineering effort, keeping our CEO Kieran, CoS Alice and Engineering Manager Andrew aligned with your decisions.
• Product briefs: Turn ideas into clear requirements, user journeys and acceptance criteria so engineers understand the problem, scope and intended outcome.
• Delivery: Be engineering’s first point of contact for product questions and decisions, so the team is never blocked waiting on direction. Stay close to work in progress, answer questions, resolve ambiguity and surface changes or risks early. Keep the wider team informed of decisions and progress.
• User experience: Consider how features fit together across the dashboard, drawing on our designer’s input where needed and using simple prototypes to explore options.
• Launch and adoption: Work with our customer-facing teams on releases, giving them the guidance they need to explain changes and help publishers use new features.
• Measurement: Define success before release, then track whether publishers use the feature, where they struggle and what needs improving. Own our product analytics, and use data and experiments to guide what we build next.
• AI in practice: Use AI to support research, synthesis, prototyping and documentation, checking the quality of its output and knowing when direct customer input is needed.

In your first few months, we’d expect clearer priorities and briefs, fewer unresolved questions reaching engineering and a consistent approach to launches. We should also have a better understanding of which features publishers use and where they need more help.

Must-haves

• Product experience: You’ve managed software features from understanding the problem through delivery, release and follow-up. You’ve written user stories and acceptance criteria in an agile team, and you’re comfortable discussing APIs, data and integrations with engineers.
• Publisher and/or startup experience: You will understand how news orgs think or prove an ability to learn quickly. You will be comfortable working independently in a small, growing business where initiative is rewarded.
• Prioritisation: Able to weigh competing requests, explain trade-offs and challenge ideas constructively, including those coming from senior leadership.
• Decision maker: You make product decisions and stand behind them. You’ll work closely with our CEO to shape direction, bring Customer Success and other stakeholders into agreement, and take clear decisions back to engineering. Getting a decision made is your job, not something you pass along.
• Clear communication: The briefs you produce will be accurate and concise (no AI slop!) and you will be comfortable working closely with engineers and non-technical team members
• Customer judgement: You look at the user’s wider workflow and use evidence to understand whether a feature is helping.
• Data led: You’ve used product analytics to make decisions and designed experiments to test ideas before committing to them. You choose the right method for the situation, whether that’s an A/B test, a staged rollout or customer interviews.
• Practical AI skills: You can show examples of using AI in your work and explain where you checked, challenged or changed its output.
• Ownership: You follow through after release, take responsibility for finding answers and raise problems while there’s still time to address them.

Nice-to-haves

• A background in user experience design, including wireframing, prototyping or usability testing.
• Experience with publishers, content distribution or media technology.
• Experience with AI products, APIs or integrations.

Benefits

• Salary up to £85,000
• Fully remote working.
• Flexible hours at a family-friendly company.
• Quarterly team meet-ups with travel covered, a team meal and activities.
• Training allowance.
• New laptop and a work-from-home stipend for necessary accessories.
• Generous annual leave.
• Opportunities to attend industry events.
• Room to develop your role as our products and team grow.

How we’re set up

We're a growing, fast-moving startup that works with some of the biggest names in news media. Our team brings experience from Stripe, Apple and a range of startups and media businesses.

We meet online as a company weekly, share company performance openly each quarter, ask the whole team for input on how we work and run a monthly learning session led by team members. Hours are flexible, many of us are parents and everyone has a training allowance. We celebrate curiosity, diversity, kindness and direct, clear communication. We use AI and automation to free up time for expertise rather than replace it.

Why you should apply

FlatPlan is central to how some of the world’s most prestigious publishers reach audiences. We pride ourselves on our impact in helping our customers thrive in a fast-moving, often challenging media landscape.

Our core product was built to serve one specific customer’s need, and has now grown into a thriving, fast-growing startup. We are both a preferred provider and direct supplier to Apple, and have been profitable since the company was founded in 2019. We share knowledge openly, support each other and make time for people’s development as the company grows.

Many of us are parents, and flexibility matters here. Everyone has a say in how we improve the company, with a 'Wonder Wall' that allows team members to share thank yous to team members and we regularly share progress, learnings and obstacles with the entire team.

Our commitment to diversity

We want our team to reflect the publishers and audiences we serve. All qualified applicants will be considered regardless of race, colour, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, background or age. We strongly encourage applications from underrepresented groups.