Role: Product Manager
Location: UK, London
Job type: Full time, permanent – hybrid or remote
Why QS?
At QS, our culture fosters a flexible working environment that encourages our employees to own their career whilst personally and professionally thriving. We collaborate, respect, and support each other – and as a company, our values underpin these.
Our mission is to empower motivated people around the world to fulfil their potential through higher education, and to ensure everyone has the same opportunity to achieve that potential. We celebrate the diversity of our teams and believe through sharing our experiences we can learn from one another and become stronger together, which enables us to achieve our goal.
At QS, you’ll be responsible for implementing real change in the international higher education landscape, full of exciting and interesting challenges where you can drive positive impact across the business.
As a Product Manager at QS, this is what you’ll be doing:
Reporting to the Lead Analytics Product Manager you will work closely with internal and external stakeholders to drive the evolution of our Analytics software platform, to increase its value to our clients and to the business. Analytics utilises QS expertise and knowledge to help Universities and Institutions bring data to empower their strategic and performance planning. We’ve recently gone through a transformation to improve the UX of our platform and are moving into an exciting phase of applying creativity to expand the reach of our insights as well as the customer needs it helps to solve. We are looking for a creative Product Manager to help push this mission forwards while ensuring customer needs are core to everything we do.
The QS product portfolio includes consultancy, branding solutions and software, which is used to manage student admissions, mobility, internationalisation, and performance data.
Role responsibilities:
You’ll be responsible for owning part of and delivering against our product roadmap, with a relentless focus on delivering the best outcomes for institutions. You’ll be responsible for:
- Collaborating with customers to compile personas, understand their needs and problems they are trying to solve
- Melding these customer inputs with those from multiple stakeholders as well as the overall strategic mission and managing prioritisation to propose the best roadmap for your product stream
- Spotting and driving synergies with other QS products and services to ensure things aren’t developed in silos but contribute to a company wide coherent offering, our ‘One QS’ approach
- Delivering against the roadmap through an agile, collaborative approach with your technology partners
- Working autonomously through the backlog while making sure that features get delivered quickly and efficiently
- Iterating on our product through user feedback and insights; putting data at the heart of our decisions
Creating market leading value propositions
We believe in empowering our Product Managers to own their product across the full lifecycle. This includes the way we position and package the product in the market. In short, you’ll be:
- Collaborating with Marketing to develop a compelling story for our product innovations and improvements
- Designing the right packages and product development plans to ensure our products can thrive commercially within the market and deliver on their commercial targets
- Running sessions with Sales to ensure we’re communicating the right story to the market
Bring collaboration to a multi-disciplinary team
Our people are at the heart of our 30 years of success. Our values focus on being helpful and authentic, providing knowledge and support to those around you. This means you’ll be:
- Building a strong culture of learning within your team, providing feedback to continuously improve the way you work together
- Working closely with the other functions of the business to share knowledge, learnings and insights
- Partnering with the wider product organisation to create an agile, but focused strategic direction
Key skills and experience:
You should apply if you:
- Have experience as a product manager or owner of a software product or have experience in an alternative role which shows experience in gathering and acting on customer and stakeholder feedback and specifying work to teams
- Are comfortable working with ambiguity and solving difficult problems
- Thrive on keeping the big picture in focus whilst delivering on short-term requirements
- Love putting users at the heart of what you do and making data-driven decisions
- Are detailed oriented with excellent analytical skills
- Enjoy working as part of a team and bringing others with you on the journey
- Can think creatively to solve technical product challenges
- Have experience and/ or knowledge of the international Higher Education market (advantageous - not essential)
So, who are we and what do we do?
QS is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics, insights, and intelligence to the global higher education sector - supporting university excellence across the world. Our student recruitment and enrolment solutions enable universities and business schools to connect with talented individuals seeking to further their academic progress and career development. Our portfolio of professional services includes consultancy, student mobility and academic partnerships management, and branding solutions. We publish highly visible and influential rankings of international universities, including the QS World University Rankings® which reaches a global audience of hundreds of millions of people.
Founded in 1990, our activities span across 50 countries, working with over 2000 of the world’s leading higher education institutions and over 12,000 employers.
Headquartered in London, QS has over 700 employees globally with offices in Australia, Malaysia, India, Romania, Singapore, France, Germany, and the USA. QS keeps growing organically, through acquisition and by recruiting top talent across key regions
We take investing in our people very seriously.
As standard our QSers have:
- Competitive base salary
- Access to an annual bonus scheme
- Flexible working options, including hybrid or remote
- 25 days annual leave, plus bank holidays – increasing to 27 days after 5 years’
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
- Generous pension through Royal London
- Comprehensive private medical insurance and wellness scheme through Vitality
- Access to QSmiles – a discount scheme that actually makes a significant difference
- Cycle to work scheme
- A vibrant social environment and multicultural and multinational culture
But that’s not all. Outside of these standard benefits we also offer resources to allow professional growth and wellness initiatives to nurture a healthy mindset:
- Free access to the Calm App – the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation
- A focus on welfare which is led by our global wellness team, with mental health first aiders globally
- Access to a variety of diversity and inclusion initiatives and groups
- Strong recognition and reward programs – including a peer-to-peer recognition platform, quarterly and annual QS Applaud Awards, Connect with your Career annual event
- Support for volunteering and study leave
- Free access to LinkedIn learning – with over 5000 courses and programmes at your fingertips
- Options to join our outstanding global Mentorship programme
Like what you’ve heard? Great, apply now!
As a candidate, we know the application and interview process can be daunting and so it’s important that you have a great experience with us. Our dedicated Talent Team will work hard to ensure you are fully informed at all stages and you are really excited by this opportunity to do meaningful work in the education space.
Equal opportunities
QS Quacquarelli Symonds is proud to be a fair and equal organisation where everyone has the same opportunity to achieve their full potential, irrespective of their background or personal attributes. We celebrate our diversity and believe through sharing our experiences we can learn from one another, be stronger together, and enable our business to thrive.