Product Manager, Platform

Who are Picnic & what do we do?

Picnic's mission is to drive a higher quality ad-funded internet. Today, a large proportion of digital advertising is ineffective, intrusive and poorly optimised. Picnic builds technology that helps brands make better decisions about where and how their advertising is shown, improving outcomes for users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We're a fast growing, founder-led startup. Over the last couple of years we've built PIQ into one of the strongest independent media quality datasets for the open web, and turned it into a profitable data licensing business, with our data now running inside the platforms where media is bought and sold.

We're now focused on commercialising that platform: growing our licensing partnerships, extending our measurement into YouTube and CTV, and using our quality data to directly improve advertiser outcomes. We're looking for our first Platform Product Manager to own the platform underneath all of it.

What will you be doing as Platform Product Manager?

You'll report to our Chief Product & Technology Officer and own the PIQ data platform: the system that measures the quality of the open web, powers our advertiser products, and generates our licensing revenue.

You will:

• Own platform health. Set the standard for coverage, freshness and accuracy across our priority markets, and decide what is acceptable, what needs fixing, and in what order
• Maintain our core data acquisition, and build further defensibility into how it works
• Own the day to day of our data licensing partnerships. You'll be the person our partners deal with, and the person accountable for our data being live, integrated and genuinely in use
• Decide which of our distribution routes are earning. Build the evidence, then make the call on where we invest further and what we stop funding
• Specify the new quality signals our advertiser products depend on, working closely with our Media Solutions team
• Explore where the platform can grow, including new revenue streams and partnership opportunities
• Investigate the data yourself. When coverage drops or a number looks wrong, you'll write the query or the script to find out why rather than raising a ticket and waiting

This platform has never had a dedicated product owner - you'll be defining how it's run, not inheriting someone else's system.

Requirements

Who are we looking for?

We're looking for someone technical and commercially minded, early in their product career but ready to be accountable for something that matters to the business. You don't need to have done this exact job. You do need to be able to get into a dataset and come out with an answer, and to be comfortable as the named person on a partner relationship.

You will:

• Have 1-2 years in a product, data, analytics or technical role
• Be able to write SQL and Python well enough to interrogate and analyse data independently
• Have owned something end to end, and be able to talk about the parts of it you got wrong
• Have clarity of thought and structured thinking, and be able to make decisions when the picture is incomplete
• Be able to create order where there isn't any, and work a problem through without someone standing over you
• Communicate clearly with engineers, commercial colleagues and external partners, and know when to adjust for the audience
• Be genuinely interested in how technology and systems work

Familiarity with advertising technology is a bonus, but not required. Programmatic advertising has a lot of jargon and not much mystery, and we'll teach you.

Benefits

Why work at Picnic?

You'll be joining at the point where a strong technical platform becomes a commercial business, and the platform you own is the thing that makes it possible.

At Picnic:

• You'll have genuine ownership and influence over the platform and its commercial direction
• You'll work directly with our Chief Product & Technology Officer, and closely with the founder and leadership team
• You'll learn programmatic advertising from the inside, at a company whose entire product is data
• Ideas move quickly from concept to production - we value momentum, learning, and impact

What can Picnic offer you?

We're proud to have been recognised by Culture100 and Flexa as one of the best and most flexible small businesses to work for. We offer:

• A flexible, hybrid working setup, with regular time together in our Bankside office
• 33 days holiday - inclusive of Bank Holidays - plus additional Christmas shutdown
• Private Medical Insurance
• Inclusive parental leave policy
• A great office, regular socials, Picnic Thursdays, Summer Fridays and 'Work from Roam' opportunities

Salary: £40-50k