Product Manager - Core & Innovation

Your team

The Sun is one of the UK's strongest brands and, like all media organisations, is having to adapt rapidly to overcome the uncertainties of a fast-moving digital world. Our website The Sun is more than a newspaper. It is an instigator, an entertainer, a cultural reference point, a finger on the pulse, a daily relationship. The Sun product team owns several digital products across the brand, including; Sun Savers, Sun Web and Mobile Apps and the Sun Digital Newspaper.

Your role

Working in the Sun product team, you will be responsible for our core platform and innovation initiatives. You will own the strategy and development for the foundational, shared technologies that power our entire digital estate, ensuring they are robust, scalable and enable other product teams to deliver value faster. Additionally, you will be our champion for innovation, tasked with exploring, prototyping and integrating new technologies and techniques. This includes investigating how AI can support our future plans and how our newsrooms can leverage new tools to drive efficiencies, ensuring The Sun stays at the cutting edge of digital media.

Day to day you will

• Own and manage the product roadmap for core platform components and shared services, balancing foundational improvements with new feature enablement for other product teams.

• Collaborate with engineering leads to define technical strategy and architecture for our core platforms.

• Build and own stakeholder relationships across product, engineering, data, and editorial teams, acting as a technical and creative consultant to help solve their challenges.

• Translate complex technical concepts and opportunities into clear, compelling proposals for non-technical stakeholders to gain buy in and approval.

• Champion a culture of experimentation and efficiency, defining and tracking KPIs related to platform performance and the impact of innovation initiatives.

• Prioritise a backlog of technical debt, platform improvements and innovation bets to ensure we are investing in the most impactful areas.

• Research emerging technologies (particularly in AI and machine learning) and identify opportunities for their application across the business.

• Lead the discovery, validation, and delivery of proofs of concept and pilot programs for new technologies to determine their viability and potential business impact.

What we're looking for from you

• Relevant experience in a technical, innovative or platform focused product management role.

• A strong technical background or a deep, demonstrable understanding of software development, APIs and platform architecture.

• A creative and curious mindset with a passion for innovation and a finger on the pulse of emerging technologies, especially AI.

• A self starter attitude, comfortable with ambiguity and adept at carving out a path forward for new and untested ideas.

• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to evangelise a vision and build consensus among both technical and business stakeholders.

• Proven ability to translate abstract business or editorial challenges into concrete technical requirements and product solutions.

• Experience with Agile methodologies and running experiments or proof of concepts to validate ideas quickly and efficiently.

• A critical thinker who can analyse complex problems, weigh trade offs and make clear, data informed decisions.

Benefits

• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary and paternity leave up to 2 weeks.

• Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.

• Private medical insurance including coverage for pre existing conditions.

• Discounted gym memberships, free ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual yoga classes.

• Bikes for Work and Electric Car scheme.

• Up to 60% discount on Harper Collins books.

• Access to exclusive events and competitions with exciting brands such as talkSPORT, Virgin Radio UK & The Times. Weekly virtual panel chats with top journalists and celebrities.

• Access to wellbeing benefits such as EAP, physio/massage and counselling.

• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%.

• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and up to 4 volunteering days per year.

We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when applying for a role. Please let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.