Product Manager - Core & Innovation

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Job Description

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. Crucially, 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:

• Act as the primary driver for innovation, researching emerging technologies (particularly in AI and machine learning) and identifying 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.

• 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.

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.

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What's in it for you? We are a diverse and dynamic team, with opportunities to learn and develop your skills in a supportive environment. We have an amazing office, a flexible working pattern and a great team culture. We'll help you deliver your best work and grow you with career and personal development through training, conferences and courses.

We are News UK: One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland. Our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, Talk and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning print and pixel, audio and video, events and experiences, our multiplatform brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.

Life at News

Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose. We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter. We inform our audiences so that they can make decisions based on trusted information.

To do this, we believe our employees must represent different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. We strive to maximise and encourage every individual's potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy, which focuses on three main priorities - attracting talent from a wider, more representative pool, developing equity programmes to drive better representation in our leadership, and ensuring diversity and inclusivity in our workforce as well as the journalism and content we produce. We also currently have 12 employee led networks and groups that support our strategy and connect like minded employees socially.

Benefits

Some of our benefits include:

• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & 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.