About Piclo

The energy industry has entered a new era. Supply and demand are decentralising fast; energy companies are starting to embrace renewables and looking for new ways to reduce costs, increase efficiency and build a smarter grid. That’s where Piclo comes in.

Piclo is on a mission to make our energy system smart, flexible and more sustainable.

Our flagship product, Piclo Flex, is an industry first. It’s the leading B2B online marketplace for flexible energy procurement in the UK, and a frontrunner in a sector that’s poised to transform smart energy technology by enabling renewables, batteries and electric vehicles to help balance the grid, both in the UK and internationally.

The role

We’re hiring a Technical Product Manager to work on both existing and new projects that are transforming the energy industry. You’ll be joining our friendly team at an exciting time - we recently secured a round of funding for the next stage in our business, so we’re busy preparing for a period of team and product growth.

This role will support two of our more technical teams: Infrastructure (responsible for scalability, reliability and efficiency of the platforms that host our products) and Integrations (enabling new capabilities through a suite of APIs and 3rd party integrations).

Your key objective is to maintain happy and productive teams while delivering product outcomes you’ve helped progress from research, design through to QA and rollout. Responsibilities for this role include but are not limited to:

Product planning

• You’ll work closely with your teams, the other product managers, CTO and CPO to plan and prioritise work from the product roadmap.
• Scoping work at both the higher level strategy stages but also down to the smallest tickets in a sprint will both be required.
• Planning sprints and managing the backlog of tickets for your team is a key responsibility.
• Keeping track of new ideas and requests for features as they come through, and working with your team to effectively prioritise work is a regular process.
• Tracking the team's progress through tickets is expected to help with effective planning and management of any delays.

Delivery

• You’ll be responsible for releasing your teams’ work and this will include making sure it’s tracked appropriately as it rolled out (e.g. flag tracking and management).
• Sharing in QA of your teams’ work and understanding the details of the product and opportunities for improvement.
• Incident management will be required as and when incidents occur (hopefully not often!)
• You’ll need to be comfortable talking to users as you may be involved in user research and post delivery testing.
• Where work is planned to a fixed delivery deadline, this will be your responsibility to meet, and keep other stakeholders informed of progress along the way.

Team support

• Working with a cross functional team.
• You’ll be responsible for making sure the team has everything they need to be effective and productive.
• While you’ll be responsible for one core team, you may be required to work with multiple teams in a support capacity.
• If your team needs new members, you’ll be involved in the planning and supporting of the hiring process, and key in their onboarding journey.
• You'll work closely with a range of different roles (e.g. design, engineering, product management, customer success, sales, and leadership) and people with different backgrounds and personality types. This will require an understanding of how to support and work with people from different disciplines, and with different skills, experience, needs and expectations.

Communication

• Planning and delivery will involve some collaboration with 3rd parties, such as existing and potential users, or partner organisations. You may need to lead these interactions at times, including managing relationships, chairing meetings and facilitating workshops, and ensure positive outcomes are reached.
• You’ll be responsible for accurately presenting your team's work at the all-hands company sprint update meeting.
• You’ll need to make sure your team all gets a chance to show off their progress to the company at Show and Tell (sprintly).
• You may be called on to present planned work to senior stakeholders or to demo newly released work to customers.
• From time to time you’ll be expected to run retrospectives for certain projects or pieces of work, making sure that lessons learned are not only fed back into your own team, but shared with other teams too.
• You will be expected to maintain a high level of understanding for the overall company and product direction.

About you

Our ideal candidate meets many - but not necessarily all - of the below criteria:

• You have 5+ years of relevant professional experience delivering an exceptional online product, ideally including some time as a product manager and ideally some in a technical role.
• You’re interested in the technology that enables our products. You seek to understand enough to form opinions on technical matters, explain technical concepts at a high level, and participate in technical discussions within Piclo and with 3rd parties.
• You are familiar with Trello, or another similar product management tool, and have experience of writing, scoping and tracking tickets as they move through the flow, reporting against KPIs as they’re delivered.
• You are an incredibly motivated and organised person. You enjoy the process of prioritising work and setting timelines while collaborating with cross-functional teams.
• You’re resourceful, resilient, and flexible, and will help clear the path for everyone to do their best work.
• You are an excellent communicator who can build relationships with teammates from different disciplines, making sure that everyone is clear what’s required of them.
• You’re fluent in English, even if it’s not your first language.

Also desirable:

• Experience in scale-up environments.
• Knowledge and experience of best practices for agile product management. Among other things, you‘re able to support the dev team to manage code reviews, testing and documentation.
• A high-level understanding of any of the following: microservice app architecture, modern cloud platforms, serverless hosting, REST APIs, developer experience, data storage/migration, information security, observability.
• Understanding of the energy industry, from the perspective of suppliers, the regulator or the networks.

What we can offer

This is a full-time role requiring approximately 35-hours per week, Monday-Friday. We imagine you’ll work (mainly) office hours.

• As you’d expect, a competitive salary, with share options comes as standard.
• Life Assurance at 3x salary.
• Private Healthcare.
• Whatever tools you need to get your job done to the best of your abilities. We’ve put a lot of care into making sure your working from home setup is optimised, including a £100 monthly expense budget for extra kit you might need.
• A modest annual allowance of £500 to spend on professional development, additional equipment, or your mental and physical wellbeing.
• The opportunity to help shape the role to find the best balance between what we need as a business and your career progression plans.
• We run fortnightly sprint meets for the whole team so everyone is aware and engaged with our progress.
• We stop early every other Friday for Show and Tell, where the tech team demo new features over [now remote] snacks and drinks.
• We also hold weekly virtual coffee mornings and host virtual film clubs and even have a baking slack channel.

How to apply and interview process

To apply, email jobs@piclo.energy with ‘Technical Product Manager’ in the subject line (or click the Apply button below) and tell us about your skills and experience, and why you think you’d be a good fit for this role.

Please include a copy of your CV or the URLs for your personal site or Linkedin profile, as well as URLs to any relevant public repositories that might support your application. Please note that, at this stage, we’re more interested in hearing why you think you’re a good match for us and the role in particular.

All being well, we generally conduct interviews in three stages, lasting approximately 2-3 weeks depending on everyone’s calendars.

1. We’ll invite you for a short video call to discuss your experience and what you’re looking for in your next role. We aim to respond to applicants within 2-3 working days at most.
2. Next up, some applicants will be invited to complete a challenge, which the team will review.
3. Successful applicants will then be invited to a more in-depth interview to meet additional members of the team and the CPO, and to pair on a live testing exercise, as well as providing an opportunity for some Q&A about the role, about Piclo, and vice versa.

We see diversity as a strength. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives but can only accept people who have the right to live and work in the UK. We are an equal opportunity employer as well as being a pleasant and supportive place to work.

A small note about COVID-19 and remote working

At Piclo, we decided to go fully remote during the recent lockdown, and have let go the lease on our cosy Shoreditch office. That means our team is currently working from home on an indefinite basis, however we plan to secure even better premises in 2021, also in the Shoreditch area. We’re proud that we’ve not had to furlough any members of the team during the pandemic, and have worked hard to ensure every member of the team has the equipment they need to work comfortably and effectively in a remote setting.