Cambridge Spark
Senior Product Manager
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Department: Product & Technology
Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to our London office)
Reports to: Head of Engineering
Hours: 37.5 per week
Salary: Depending on experience
A quick note before you apply: We are only able to accept applications from candidates who are currently based in the UK and hold the legal right to work here.
Role Overview
This is a significant new role. Cambridge Spark's product estate has outgrown a single product manager, and we are splitting it by domain rather than by feature queue. This role takes the employer-facing side of the platform and, distinctively, becomes the accountable product owner for the business's internal data and reporting products.
That second part is the defining feature of the role. Today, reporting across Cambridge Spark is largely ad hoc: assembled on request, held in the heads of the people who assemble it, and trusted unevenly as a result. You will be building owned data products where none currently exist, with real service levels attached, for an audience that spans every function in the business. This is build-out work, not maintenance.
You will work as an embedded member of the tech team, alongside engineering pods that own outcomes rather than backlogs, and you will report directly to the Head of Engineering.
Shape of the First Year
We would rather be specific than vague about what this role actually involves on arrival.
Employer Experience
comes first. The vision for it already exists, with the skeleton of a roadmap. We are hiring the engineering pod to deliver it in parallel with this role. Your first year is largely about building and executing that roadmap well with a team that is still forming, including helping us hire the rest of it.
Data Portfolio
runs alongside it. This is the part with no pre-built direction. You will be defining what our internal data products are, who they serve, and what standard they are held to, more or less from first principles.
Internal Experience
joins the remit later. We expect the internal tooling domain to come into scope as that pod stands up. It is genuine future scope and part of why this role is pitched at senior level, but it is not first-six-months work.
Key Responsibilities
Employer Experience
- Own the outcome: employers experience Cambridge Spark as a credible, well-run partner, and the product surfaces they touch make the value of their investment visible and easy to act on
- Own the Employer Experience roadmap: converting the existing vision into a prioritised and sequenced roadmap, and delivering it
- Own the backlog and the problem framing beneath that roadmap, and challenge solutions where you think we have the wrong one
- Work with commercial and delivery stakeholders to understand employer pain points and translate them into product opportunities
- Ensure employer-facing reporting and engagement features are accurate, timely, and show the information that’s valuable, not just what’s easy
- Contribute to hiring the Employer Experience pod, and to getting a newly formed team productive quickly
Data Products
- Own the outcome: data and reporting across the business are reliable, accessible, and trusted, and decision-makers self-serve the information they need
- Establish and own a portfolio of internal data products, partnering with our Data and Analytics function to define what gets built, for whom, and to what standard
- Define clear service levels and success criteria for data products — accuracy, timeliness, availability — and hold delivery against them
- Drive measurable improvement in the quality and adoption of data-informed decision-making
- Prioritise data and reporting work coherently alongside the employer roadmap rather than as a side channel
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Internal Experience (once the pod is hired)
- Own the outcome, once the domain is in scope: the teams delivering our programmes — delivery, operations, coaching, admissions support — have tools that make their work faster and less error-prone, rather than working around the product
Delivery and Stakeholders
- Own the outcome: engineering capacity in your domains is spent on the right things, and launches happen against clear readiness criteria
- Act as the primary product interface with engineering across your domains, with requirements clear and ready ahead of sprint planning
- Write clear product requirements and user stories, and clarify them through delivery rather than throwing them over the wall
- Define launch readiness and go/no-go criteria; engineering owns the technical rollout mechanics
- Manage expectations across a broad senior internal audience, communicating scope, risk, and timeline changes clearly and early
Candidate Specification
Product and Data
- Prior ownership of internal data or reporting products — a data-PM, BI, or analytics-adjacent background. With the internal tooling pod starting up in future, data is roughly half the role at first, not a nice-to-have
- A track record, as a Product Manager in a technology company or scale-up, of turning a vision and a set of headline deliverables into a sequenced roadmap a team can ship against
- Strong data and analytics capability: defining data products, working with analytics tooling, and setting service levels for accuracy, timeliness, and availability
- Experience of working with a newly formed team, or of standing up a product practice where none previously existed
- Proficient in requirements gathering and in writing product requirements and user stories that engineers can act on
Stakeholder and Communication
- Comfortable telling a senior stakeholder something they do not want to hear, early, with a recommendation attached
- Strong written communication: you can write a clear proposal, a concise decision record, or a stakeholder update that lands without needing translation
Ways of Working
- Calibrated to what is already decided. On the data portfolio, nothing is set and the direction is yours to define. On Employer Experience, the vision and the headline deliverables are set; the sequencing, scoping, and detail are yours to build
- Outcome ownership over feature delivery. You question whether the proposed solution is the right one, not just whether it can be built
- Comfortable with ambiguity. Small pods mean limited process overhead. You make good decisions with incomplete information and know when to escalate versus when to proceed
- AI-first mindset. We are an AI company and expect our product practice to reflect that; you use AI tooling actively rather than being curious about it from a distance
What This Role Is Not
- It is not a delivery-management role. You are accountable for what gets built and why, not for administering a board
- It is not a people management role: you will not have direct reports, though you will be a senior product voice and are expected to act like one
- It is not a role where the data remit is somebody else's problem. The data portfolio is roughly half of the job in year one. If you want to run a product domain and leave the reporting estate to a data team, this is not the right fit
- It is not a blank-canvas role on the employer experience side. We have a clear view of that product vision and we intend to reach it; if you need to set the direction yourself in every domain you own, the fit will be uncomfortable
- It is not a big-company environment: we are a bootstrapped EdTech business, and you will need to be comfortable with resource constraints and a degree of ambiguity about what comes next
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Why This Role
- A defined starting point and a genuine build-out in the same job: a vision ready to build a roadmap from on the employer side, and a data portfolio you get to establish rather than inherit
- A remit that grows on a known trajectory, with internal tooling joining the domain in future
- Direct access to and influence with senior leadership, including the Head of Engineering and CEO
- Work that matters: our EdTech platform supports thousands of learners across data and AI apprenticeships, and the employers funding those apprenticeships deserve to see what they are getting
- An AI-serious culture, including the time and space to experiment
- A stable, values-driven business with a social impact mission in education and skills
Company Benefits:
- Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
- 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
- A day for volunteering
- Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
- Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
- Annual Summer and Xmas events
- Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
- CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
- Private medical insurance and cash plan
- Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
- Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor
Background to our Organisation
We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.
We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.
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