Junior Product Manager

Overview

• Start date: ASAP
• Reporting to: Senior Product Manager
• Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.
• Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history and right to work.
• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by:  1st August
• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

Role

We’re growing our Product team to deliver more valuable and seamless experiences for public servants around the world. As we expand our features and reach, we’re hiring a Junior Product Manager to help us stay organised, move quickly, and make better product decisions with data.

This is a hands-on role for someone eager to learn product craft in a cross-functional, fast-moving environment. You’ll support the product team in everything from sprint planning and backlog grooming to user research, QA, and analytics. You won’t be expected to know it all already, but you should be eager to ask questions, automate what’s repetitive, and help the team deliver value faster and better.

You’ll work closely with Product Managers, designers, and engineers to scope and ship features, run experiments, and turn user insights into action. Your work will directly support Apolitical’s goals around engagement, retention, and product scalability to help make governments smarter.

What you'll be doing

• Helping plan sprints, track delivery, and maintain our backlog and documentation
• Writing SQL or Python queries and creating lightweight dashboards to inform decisions
• Drafting QA test plans and running tests before new features go live
• Prototyping AI-based tools and no-code automations to improve internal workflows
• Triage product feedback and help turn insights into actions
• Contributing to user research by writing surveys, preparing interviews, and synthesising findings

What you won't be doing

• Managing engineers directly or setting product strategy
• Writing long documents or doing “pure” UX research full-time
• Stuck working only on one feature or project

Role expectations

Within one month, you will…

• Be onboarded into our tools, workflows, and current roadmap
• Start helping triage bugs, update tickets, and run basic QA
• Join sprint planning and surface blockers or risks
• Within three months, you will…
• Contribute to user research planning and documentation
• Run your own QA passes for new features
• Set up simple dashboards or write basic SQL queries to track product metrics

Within six months, you will…

• Own a recurring product operations process (e.g. triaging feedback, writing release notes)
• Prototype an automation or AI tool that improves team efficiency
• Contribute analysis or research to guide product decisions

About you

This is a great fit if you…

• Get excited by solving practical problems with research, logic, and data
• Like thinking in systems and are comfortable juggling moving parts
• Are curious about how digital products are built and improved
• Can break complex ideas into simple explanations and structured plans
• Love a good spreadsheet, query, or debugging session
• Want to work on products that aim to make government work better

This likely won’t be the right role if you…

• Prefer fully scoped tasks and predictable workflows
• Are looking for a narrow or highly specialised role — this one is broad by design
• Aren’t interested in analytics, research, or technical tools

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application. No one at Apolitical sees the answers to these demographic questions with your application. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.