Group Product Manager - Student Placement Operations

About IDP

IDP is the global leader in international education services, delivering global success to students, test takers and our partners, through trusted human relationships, digital technology and customer research. An Australian-listed company, we operate in more than 50 countries around the world.

Our team is comprised of over 7,000 people of various nationalities, ages and cultural backgrounds. Proudly customer-first, our expert people are powered by global technology. Together, we offer unmatched services, helping local dreams become realities, all over the world.

Learn more at www.careers.idp.com

Role purpose

We’re looking for an outstanding Group Product Manager to help deliver our ongoing transformation of student placement services and counsellor-facing experiences.  

Our team is passionate about the customer experience and meeting the needs of our customers today, while innovating to delight them tomorrow. The Group Product Manager (SP Operations) will lead the co-creation, evolution and development of our market leading international student recruitment products and capabilities that enable, empower and evolve with our changing counselling model and lead the end-to-end product lifecycle for our counselling channels.  

You will own the product portfolio roadmap and delivery, balancing the development of strategic product plans that mobilise a future-state operational capability and business architecture (including the CRM platform). You will lead a product team to develop, manage and deliver the specific product and platform roadmaps and lifecycles within your portfolio – including events, student essentials, operational and application management product portfolios. You will have accountability for end-to-end delivery ensuring change, operational and workflow fit, process and automation efficiencies to achieve targeted benefit outcomes.

This is an opportunity to play a leading role in accelerating IDP’s global growth and the evolution of our business model creating innovative services that provide unique value for our students, counselling teams, and clients that drive scale, market share and competitive advantage.

This is a hybrid role based out of the IDP Melbourne office, reporting to the Head of Product. This a global role which comes with expectation of working hours that enable effective collaboration with our global product, marketing and data, engineering and delivery colleagues in Melbourne, Australia; Chennai, India and London, UK.

Deliverables

Act as the product lead for lead for end-to-end counselling experience, events experience and student essentials, representing the needs of counselling teams internally

Lead and support the product management team as subject-matter-experts to deliver on the portfolio roadmap and objectives

Work with our commercial, portfolio, CX, UX and analytics teams via direct interaction with counselling teams globally to deeply understand, define, frame problems and commercial opportunities. You will use  co-creation and design thinking to develop and evaluate potential solutions.

Conduct regular internal, external and competitor analysis and research to identify and prioritise risks, problems and opportunities.

Support the development of strategy, business architecture, business cases and delivery plans working with the Head of Product, commercial leaders, product leadership and other key stakeholders globally.

Propose and own the delivery of objectives and key results for your product portfolio and team including effective impact evaluation and risk management.

Lead the development, prioritisation, and delivery of the roadmap for your product portfolio to deliver on IDP’s strategic and revenue growth goals and the needs of our counselling teams, student essentials students and clients, events students, clients and network teams working closely with Product managers.

Support the Head of Product in managing and leading key strategic initiatives within your product portfolio – including the development and refinement of business cases, product vision, roadmaps, experience and journey design, prioritisation, product requirements and stakeholder communications.

Other duties as required from time to time by the Head of Product

Add value by

Work effectively with the value delivery office and project managers on programme and project planning, PI planning and stakeholder communications.

Input design and development of product propositions that will be delivered via counselling channels with objective of simplification, integrated workflow, efficiency and automation of delivery of the value proposition.

Support the development and embedding of our global product culture, processes, and systems.

Manage, develop, and coach your team establishing a growth culture and encouraging commerciality, innovation, quality and urgency (time to value).

Collaborate effectively with colleagues globally to ensure priority counselling and operational needs are considered and integrated planning, prioritisation and sequencing with global product leadership.

Represent the company externally to support business and brand development and staff recruitment.

Maintain an awareness of the higher education sector, policy environment, and competition and developments in related industries and technology and leverage to present risk, opportunities and drive innovation.

Accountable for compliance of your team with company policies and procedures, particularly in relation to budget planning, management and procurement, and privacy and security.

About you

Proven experience in liaising closely with development to build & execute the product vision.

Growth mind set - outcome and solution focused, sees challenges as a chance to learn, able to support and motivate the team to overcome obstacles, find solutions and achieve outstanding performance.

Excellent team leadership, management skills leading delivery through others and supporting your team to develop and progress.

Comfortable with fast pace, ambiguity and working individually or collaboratively to deeply understand problems and propose solutions.

Creative, entrepreneurial, self-driven and focused on quality and minimising time to value.

High attention to detail and the ability to effectively manage multiple priorities to meet challenging deadlines.

Required experience

Tertiary qualifications with +8-10 years’ experience leading product teams and/or central operations teams (CRM experience), portfolio and outcomes

High adaptability to changing operational landscapes with experience in navigating for outcomes in a fluid, fast paced and complex operating environment

Passion for the transformative nature of sales operations, customer omni-channel experience understanding and drive to make a difference in this space.

Significant senior product management experience in a complex global environment or equivalent driving the successful development and go to market of digital marketplace products and front-line and operational support teams.

Detailed knowledge, with practical application and experience, of product strategy, product management frameworks and ways of working.

Experience of agile and lean thinking and creating robust and repeatable product practices (process, systems, and frameworks).

Ability to use design thinking to identify, evaluate, test and refine potential solutions to complex problems harnessing customer journey mapping, co-creation, experimentation, analytics, prototyping and user testing.

Ability to think deeply about product design decisions and to work effectively with Product Managers and UX/UI designers to create simple, consistent and intuitive user experiences, journeys and interfaces.

Desirable:

Expert knowledge of sales and operational systems and processes, global business and account management models. Leadership experience in managing CRM, lead and channel business rules, workflow and service design preferred.

International education experience