Principal Product Manager

Main purpose of the role & responsibilities in the business:

This role is responsible for defining the product vision, strategy, and long-term roadmap. You will own a product business plan and apply best-practice methodologies to translate the roadmap into the development of new products and/or associated services. Acting as a commercial 'Product CEO', you’ll also ensure we maximise the value of our existing offerings and drive adoption across our customer base and the wider market. 

We’re looking for a strategic leader with a strong commercial mindset and a solid grasp of technology. You’ll be comfortable engaging with technical detail when needed, but your strength lies in stepping back to shape the broader vision. You’ll define long- and short-term investment priorities, drive execution with clarity, and ensure rigour in upfront thinking to deliver a strategy that’s robust, future-proof, and sets the direction for the next 2–3 years of product evolution. 

Spending time in the market to understand customer problems, identify trends, and develop innovative solutions for broader business needs is an essential part of the role. 

You must be able to communicate with all areas of the Workday Product Business in Kainos, particularly at more senior levels to communicate the strategy, update on progress, and to support leadership in making the right decisions quickly – you will need to be succinct, convincing, and show yourself as an expert in your area whilst demonstrating commercial awareness.  

You’ll bring a clear understanding of the wider market landscape—translating trends, competitor movements, and customer priorities into actionable strategy. You’ll ensure we maintain an up-to-date, well-documented fact base that underpins decision-making across the business. Your insights will not only shape our product direction but also equip customer-facing teams with the context and confidence they need to succeed. 

Based on a clear, agreed roadmap you need to be able to ensure timely execution, providing confidence to customer-facing teams and leadership. You will work with the development team to define release requirements. You will define the go-to-market strategy, own the value proposition, product positioning, key benefits, target customer, and defining and tracking KPIs. You will also serve as the internal and external evangelist for your product offering, building the external profile of Kainos and our offerings through key events, social media, thought leadership, as well as working with the sales channel and key customers. 

Minimum (essential) requirements:

• A minimum of 6 years’ experience in a senior product role working on, analyzing, building, marketing, pricing and launching software products. 

• Excellent communication skills are vital. You’ll need to be a persuasive and effective communicator with strong negotiating skills. It’s not only about talking, but you’ll also need to be able to listen, understand, and build on other’s viewpoints.  

• It will be particularly important to be able to demonstrate ability to communicate effectively with senior management, pitching with the right level of detail, helping drive fast decision-making, and providing confidence through reporting that is geared to the key (often commercially focused) questions they have. 

• You will be able to show yourself as a strategic thinker – able to understand the details and immediate priorities but rise above it to put together an overall product strategy, setting it within the wider market and business context, and focusing on the longer-term objectives, market positioning, and commercial impacts. 

• You will need an eye for detail, particularly to interpret supplied information and understand sources and challenge where necessary. 

• The ability to facilitate team meetings and group conversations.

• Relevant commercial experience and the ability to differentiate the technically interesting from the commercial priorities that solve the biggest business issues.

• Demonstrate you can manage upwards and step in as required take on a leader role in the Product Management team. 

• Ability to ensure there is a good collaborative ‘buyer-supplier’ relationship in place with our development teams – where we constantly identify areas for enhancement and innovation, but where Product Management provides clarity of scope and outputs and manages to a plan. 

• Have a proven track record of working closely with business analysts, product development leads/architects to advance functional and non-functional aspects of the product.

Desirable:

About Kainos Smart:

Our cloud-based automated testing tool, Kainos Smart, is one of a kind. It is the only product that has been built exclusively for testing Workday. It is designed to make automated Workday testing easy for all users regardless of technical or testing background. With Smart you can quickly create repeatable tests covering Workday business processes, security configuration and integrations. Using Smart, our clients are saving thousands of man hours on testing and gaining much greater assurance on the correctness of their Workday deployment.