Product Manager Connection & Access

Function

About Elia

Elia develops the electricity grid, the electricity markets, facilitates access to them and establishes ancillary services to ensure a secure, efficient and reliable electricity system. As Belgium’s transmission system operator, Elia is at the forefront of the energy transition: integrating large volumes of renewable energy, enabling electrification of our society, connecting new technologies and designing flexibility solutions that deliver the best outcomes for society.

Within Elia, the System & Client Solutions (SCS) department is responsible for products that make this vision a reality. We design and implement the solutions needed to support the Belgian grid — from enabling both TSO and DSO grid user connections within a context of growing congestion, to developing the ancillary services that ensure system security as the energy landscape transforms. We serve customers, partners, and market parties across Belgium.

About the role

As a product manager, you are responsible for the business solutions within your scope: ensuring that customer and system needs, operational realities, regulatory and legal requirements as well as digital capabilities are translated into coherent and effective solutions.

You report to a Product Lead within SCS and work closely with Product Owners and domain experts. Through regular engagement with internal and external customers and stakeholders, you shape the direction of your solutions and build alignment across Customers, Operations, IT, Regulatory Affairs and other relevant stakeholders.

Context

Grid Users (GU) are Elia’s only directly connected clients, subscribing to the Connection business solution. Our clients face a number of challenges, including the energy transition, its complexity and cost, and the steep increase in electrification needs. Attracting and retaining energy-intensive businesses, in a context where the pace of connection requests is higher than the development of the grid, is key for Belgian society (socially, economically, environmentally, etc.), but also for keeping the cost of our system in check.

Access Contract Holders (ACHs) enable Grid Users to access the electricity system. An ACH is the party that holds the contractual right to access the Elia grid for one or more injection or offtake points and carries important financial and administrative obligations toward Elia. The ACH role becomes strategically more important as access itself becomes scarce and complex.

Your role

As Product Manager Connection and Access, the problem you own is to improve the end-to-end experience of Grid Users and Access Contract Holders. Your priorities include making the best use of available connection capacity, increasing the certainty and predictability of Elia’s services, delivering better value for money and simplifying the customer journey.

You develop solutions that release capacity in the connection queue, improve delivery timelines and guide prospective customers towards mature, achievable connection opportunities. You also improve the customer experience during infrastructure delivery and throughout the operational phase.

Your responsibilities

As Product Manager, you are accountable for the customer problem, the solution design, its implementation, and the business outcomes it delivers. You own your product scope end-to-end, from discovery and problem framing through to adoption, evolution or retirement.

You engage with customers, operations teams, market participants, regulators and internal stakeholders to understand their needs, test assumptions and prioritize opportunities. You make transparent, evidence-based trade-offs between customer value, operational feasibility, regulatory requirements and the wider interests of the electricity system.

You define the end-to-end business solution within your scope, including its regulatory framework, processes, rules, incentives and supporting digital capabilities. As the reference point for your domain, you maintain a holistic view of the solution and bring together the expertise needed to develop it. You also contribute your own expertise through design notes and regulatory documents.

You translate strategic objectives into a clear product vision, measurable outcomes and a prioritised roadmap. Working closely with Product Owners in charge of the implementation and with the delivery teams, you ensure that solutions are feasible, deliver value and address the underlying customer problem.

You build trusted partnerships across Elia and with external stakeholders, including regulatory authorities. You align stakeholders around shared outcomes, manage dependencies and resolve obstacles that could delay delivery.

To succeed in this role, you combine strategic and analytical thinking with sound, evidence-based judgement. You keep customer needs at the centre of decision-making and build alignment across complex stakeholder groups through influence rather than formal authority.

Your Profile

• A university degree in Engineering, Business Engineering, or a related field.
• At least 10 years of experience in product management, market design, regulatory design, or a comparable role, with a proven ability to take ownership of complex challenges from strategy through implementation.
• Demonstrated experience in owning and shaping regulatory or market frameworks, including direct engagement with regulators or comparable external authorities.
• Experience working successfully in complex, multi-stakeholder environments, balancing diverse interests and driving alignment towards common objectives.
• Solid experience in the energy or electricity sector is a strong asset, providing you with a good understanding of the challenges and opportunities driven by the energy transition and electrification for large industrial companies and B2B customers. However, we are also open to experienced profiles from other sectors, particularly those with complex customer lifecycles, technical environments and significant regulatory constraints.
• You are comfortable engaging in technical discussions and can leverage your education and/or professional experience to lead conversations with customers and internal experts across grid development, engineering, asset management, market design and operations.
• The adaptability to perform effectively during organizational transformation, where roles, responsibilities, and ownership boundaries continue to evolve.
• You are fluent in English and either French or Dutch, and have at least a professional working proficiency in the other national language.

Offer

Location