Principal, Product Management

Principal Product Management (Product Excellence)

This role aligns to market industry titles such as Principal Product Manager.

Location: Remote UK

About Pearson

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.

About the Role

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 and that work for our business. The Product Excellence team brings together experienced product managers and leaders to work on Pearson's most complex product challenges, and to build the capabilities, culture and operating model that product teams need in order to deliver outcomes for learners and the business.

We are looking for a senior product strategist and practitioner to work with senior leaders on product strategy that is grounded in customer evidence, and to coach the PMs and leaders responsible for those areas. The role involves structuring ambiguous problems for business unit leadership teams, and also sitting with experienced PMs to run discovery and build with engineering. The other half of the job is creating the standards, playbooks and artefact templates that make good practice repeatable across Pearson.

Who you are

You are curious about customers and comfortable in the detail of the work. You can take an unclear problem, structure it, and explain it to a senior audience in a way that helps them decide. You know the craft well and you hold to the principles over the process. You have a considered view on where AI helps a product and where it does not. You teach by working alongside people, and you want to raise the standard of product management across the business.

What you'll work on

Coaching and embedded delivery

• Coach senior PMs and leaders on product strategy and practice, including sceptical ones, with credibility earned by doing the work alongside them.
• Coach teams on continuous discovery, both generative and evaluative, and on running discovery alongside delivery.
• Run sprints with engineering teams or start-ups to deliver and integrate AI innovation, with evidence to support the decisions taken.
• Design and deliver training based on Pearson's own product problems.

Product strategy with leaders

• Work with senior business unit teams to build product strategy grounded in customer evidence, covering the vision, the bets being placed, how they are sequenced, and the outcomes expected.
• Understand each business unit's product strategy well enough to support more flexible investment decisions, so that funding can move towards growth during the year as well as at annual planning.
• Develop business cases and integration roadmaps, and agree how success will be measured before work starts.
• Explain product direction clearly to senior stakeholders, with a line back to customer needs and business outcomes.

Foundations and industrialisation

• Create the standards, playbooks and artefact templates used across the product community, drawing on approaches already tested with live teams.
• Help shape the planning and discovery practices of the operating model, including QBRs, roadmap planning and discovery cadence.
• Build working prototypes with engineering to test a strategy before it is funded.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of product management experience
• Leading product teams to build, in authentically product-led environments
• A deep and practical understanding of what customer led product development really means
• A track record of building product strategy with senior leaders: framing the bets, deciding the sequence, and getting a leadership team to commit.
• Experience building and shipping product features as the owning PM.
• Experience of empowered product team models, SVPG-style or similar, where teams own outcomes. Ideally experience of product planning processes such as QBRs or roadmap planning.
• A track record of running continuous discovery and translating what you learn into outcomes.
• Experience coaching other PMs, including people more senior or more experienced than you.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with engineering and with senior business audiences.

Bonus experience

• Hands-on experience with AI, LLMs and agentic systems in production, including evaluation, telemetry and human-in-the-loop design.
• Some consulting or strategy background applied to product problems.
• Background as an engineer, technical PM or technical founder.
• Experience designing and delivering PM training or coaching programmes.
• Experience in education technology, content systems or content-intensive industries.

What success looks like

In the first 6 months:

• A product strategy built with at least one business unit leadership team, with the bets and their sequence agreed.
• At least one team visibly stronger as a result of work you led.
• A solid understanding of one business's customers and market, and working relationships with the senior PMs, leaders and stakeholders in it.

In the first 18 months:

• Led a meaningful product or feature build, with teams around you improved as a result
• Standards, playbooks and templates in active use by PMs across Pearson.
• Examples of practice changes and strategy decisions that held after you moved on.
• A reputation across business units as someone experienced PMs and BU leaders ask to be involved.

Why this matters

• Influence on where Pearson invests as well as how it builds.
• Work that reaches millions of learners.
• A mix of strategy, build and capability work in an organisation that is changing how it operates.