Lead, Product Management

Description: This role aligns to industry level titles such as Director of Product Management.

At Pearson, we are committed to helping people make progress in their lives through learning. We create innovative and accessible educational products and services that foster personal and professional growth.

We embrace an SVPG-inspired Product Operating Model, empowering our product teams to solve hard customer and business problems – in ways that our customers love, yet work for our business. Product companies depend on strong products, and strong products come from strong product teams. And we recognise that product teams are only as strong as their product managers.

We are hiring an experienced product leader to run a portfolio of product areas within our Content Authoring Platform, with deep expertise at the intersection of product management and service design. You will manage 2-3 PMs while staying personally hands-on in the most demanding work – particularly where the platform meets the complex, multi-actor content workflows used across Pearson's business units. We are looking for someone who has done this work in earnest, not just sponsored it.

You are a curious, principled product leader equally at home mapping a 12-step content workflow on a wall or writing a sharp PRD with a technical architect. You think in terms of your user problems and goals they have, design measurement before you build, and have a clear view of where AI is the answer and where it is not. You break complex problems down, coach senior PMs without alienating them, and care about education.

Hands-on product leadership

• Develop product and capability strategy for one or more areas, grounded in deep understanding of complex customer journeys spanning content development, content quality, measuring learning outcomes, and the workflows that connect them.
• Lead the hardest product work in your portfolio personally, role modelling, coaching and elevating others in your organisation – run discovery, write the PRDs and specs, make the build vs. buy vs. partner calls.
• Define value propositions traceable to user jobs and business outcomes; plan leading and lagging measurement up front; hold yourself and the team to outcomes – author productivity, content quality, cycle time, downstream learner impact.

Service design and discovery

• Lead service design to map and re-imagine end-to-end content workflows across multiple actors – authors, editors, reviewers, content producers, sales teams, government, learners – and the systems behind them.
• Drive customer centricity in the organisation – shared service blueprints, journey maps, and operating models that engineering, design, and others can act on.
• Run workshops and co-design sessions with content teams; drive continuous discovery using both generative and evaluative methods, with direct engagement of authors, producers, and downstream consumers of platform capabilities.

Player-coach leadership

• Manage and develop 2-3 product managers – set clear expectations; coach on discovery, strategy, and technical abilities; support their growth and leadership development.
• Model the discovery, outcome thinking, collaborative practice, and problem solving we expect across the platform team.
• Contribute to capability building across the wider authoring team – this is a platform group that needs to raise its own bar over time.

AI, technology and stakeholders

• Engage credibly with engineering on architecture, API, and integration decisions, bringing rigorous user focus and a peer-level relationship with your engineering leaders.
• Lead practical evaluation and adoption of AI capabilities for content workflows – AI-assisted authoring, quality assurance, accessibility, reuse – focused on users, trust, and integrated workflows.
• Build trust-based relationships with content authoring leaders, editorial leadership, and operations partners; influence without direct authority, surface risks early, and tell a clear story.

• 10+ years of product management experience, including PM leadership experience.
• Demonstrated depth in service design for complex, multi-actor workflows – done hands-on, not just sponsored.
• Track record running structured continuous discovery (generative and evaluative) and translating insight into outcomes.
• Experience with platform or B2B2C products serving multiple user types; strong technical acumen and comfortable with build vs. buy decisions.
• Data fluency – instrumentation, leading and lagging metrics, data-led decisions.
• Hands-on experience with current AI tools in product work, with a clear view of where AI is and is not the right tool.
• Experience in empowered product team models (SVPG-style or similar); coaches senior PMs and tells a clear product story.

• Content management, publishing, authoring tools, editorial systems, or related workflow-heavy domains.
• Education technology, media, or content-intensive industries.
• Formal training or practitioner experience in service design – journey mapping, blueprinting, jobs-to-be-done at workflow level.
• Leading platform rationalisation or system consolidation programmes.

In the first 6 months:

• Clear picture of the portfolio you own, the people on it, and the strengths and gaps in the team.
• Direct understanding of key users, priority workflows – and strong relationships with the authors, editors, operators, stakeholders, and customers.
• A coherent set of outcome-based priorities for your portfolio, grounded in a shared service-level view agreed with engineering, design, and BU leadership.

In the first 18 months:

• Measurable improvement in priority workflow outcomes – cycle time, quality, reuse, accessibility, author productivity.
• Your PMs visibly developing – stronger discovery, clearer outcome ownership, sharper strategic thinking.
• A shared model for how the platform supports BU content workflows, used across multiple BUs; AI capabilities evaluated and, where appropriate, in production.

• Lead at the rare point where product, service design, and platform engineering meet – at scale.
• A platform at an inflection point: legacy consolidation, AI disruption, varied workflows across businesses.
• Direct impact on educational content used by millions of learners.

Pearson is a global learning company committed to helping people make progress in their lives through learning. As we evolve from a traditional textbook publisher to a digital-first learning company, we are investing in the platforms, products, and people that will power the next generation of learning experiences. Our digital products represent the majority of our revenue, and the way we build them is changing rapidly.

Compensation at Pearson is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific location. As required by the California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York State, New York City, Vermont, Washington State, and Washington DC laws, the pay range for this position is as follows:    

The minimum full-time salary range is between $200,000 - $250,000.  

This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program, and information on benefits offered is here.  

Applications will be accepted through 3rd July. This window may be extended depending on business needs.