Frontiers

Product manager in academic publishing

In short

Senior Product Manager role at Frontiers, a large open-access academic research publisher, based onsite in London. The role owns a product area end-to-end — roadmap, multi-stakeholder requirements, cross-team delivery without direct authority, data-driven decision making, and leading a squad of engineers, designers and analysts without formal reporting lines. Requires 5+ years in Product Management, ideally with multi-stakeholder, operations-heavy or platform-level product ownership; background in academic publishing, SaaS, multi-tenant B2B or AI/ML products is a plus.

About Frontiers
At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet. We are one of the world's largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere.
Responsibilities
•Define and drive the roadmap for your product area, balancing user needs, business priorities, and platform constraints into a clear, sequenced plan.
•Gather, document, and reconcile requirements from multiple stakeholders — internal teams, partners, or end users — into a coherent, scalable product definition rather than a pile of one-off requests.
•Work with and through engineering, design, and other product teams to ship your roadmap, tracking dependencies and resolving conflicts without necessarily having direct authority over every team involved.
•Engage directly with the people who use or depend on your product — authors, editors, reviewers, partners, or internal teams — to uncover real underlying needs and validate that proposed solutions solve them.
•Where requirements conflict with simplicity or scale, propose solutions — configuration over customisation, shared workflows over bespoke branches — that satisfy the intent without fragmenting the platform.
•Steer your roadmap with data: define the metrics that matter for your area, track them, and show what you measured, what you changed, and what moved. Be ready to change course when the data says you were wrong.
•Hold the bar for whatever your product area delivers, and manage risk transparently when timelines, dependencies, or stakeholder expectations are under pressure.
•Define acceptance criteria, test with real users before release, and own post-launch quality.
•Set a clear vision for your product area and connect it to Frontiers' one-platform strategy, so every roadmap choice traces back to a purpose.
•Build and defend the business case for your product. Set the investment, expected return and payback, and answer for whether it was worth it.
•Lead your squad of engineers, designers and analysts toward shared goals. Coach, set direction and raise the bar, even without formal reporting lines.
•Give the Head of Product and senior leadership regular, candid updates on progress, risks and trade-offs. Bring a recommendation with each decision you need.
•Find where AI agents and automation can remove manual work or improve outcomes in your area. Then scope, ship and measure them.
•Take your product from idea through launch to adoption. Plan rollout, train users, then track usage and iterate until the outcome moves.
•When data, access or alignment is missing, say what you need, from whom and how you will get it. Keep moving in the meantime.
Requirements
•You think critically and bring structure and clear rationale to ambiguous, cross-domain problems.
•5+ years in Product Management, ideally including ownership of a multi-stakeholder, operations-heavy, or platform-level product.
•Proven ability to gather, document, and unify requirements from multiple demanding stakeholders into a coherent product definition.
•Comfortable discussing workflows, data, and system design with engineers, and reading the evidence behind a problem, without needing to be a domain specialist on day one.
•A track record of turning a complex process into an experience that different types of users can complete with confidence.
•Experience delivering through other teams and aligning multiple roadmaps toward a shared outcome, including without direct authority over every team involved.
•You can point to what you measured, what you changed, and what moved as a result of your product work.
•You take responsibility without being asked. When you hit an obstacle, you ask "how do I get this done?" and propose a path. You treat mistakes as information and move on quickly.
Nice to have
•Background in academic publishing, SaaS platforms, multi-tenant B2B products, or AI/ML products is a plus, but strong learning agility can substitute for direct domain experience.
Conditions
•We prioritise office presence and emphasise in-person collaboration, but also offer appropriate adjustments where needed, in line with company policy.
•Extra wellbeing days on top of your annual leave allowance.
•Up to 3 paid volunteering days each year.
•24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme (wellbeing, mental health, legal & financial support).
•Learning & development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub.
•Competitive local benefits, country dependent (e.g. healthcare and pension/retirement provision).

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