Company Overview

Gladstone has been transforming leisure management software for over 40 years. Our platforms power bookings, memberships and payments for councils, universities, trusts and leisure operators across the UK and Ireland.

We're investing heavily in the future of our products, and we're looking for a Product Manager to lead one of our most important strategic programmes.

Your initial focus will be our payments platform, delivering improvements that enhance the customer experience and support business growth. You'll thrive in this role if you enjoy bringing order to complexity, building alignment across teams, and turning ambitious plans into successful delivery.

Key Responsibilities

Product Delivery

• Drive the delivery of a strategic payments investment, balancing ambitious timescales with quality, collaboration and customer outcomes.
• Work closely with engineering teams to translate business and customer needs into clear priorities.
• Proactively identify, manage and communicate delivery risks, project dependencies and critical paths to keep delivery on schedule.
• Navigate the practical realities of payments delivery, including working with payment service providers and gateways, compliance and regulatory considerations, and how pricing models translate into technical and commercial decisions.

Stakeholder Management

• Build strong relationships across Product, Engineering, Commercial, Finance and Customer Success.
• Coordinate delivery with third-party development partners, influencing outcomes without direct authority.
• Provide clear, regular communication to stakeholders throughout delivery.
• Encourage collaboration across the business to ensure successful adoption of new products and features.

Product Management

• Contribute to and help shape the product backlog and roadmap, working closely with the Head of Product.
• Balance customer needs, commercial priorities and technical considerations.
• Measure success through customer adoption, commercial outcomes and realised business value, not simply releasing software.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Experience in a Product Manager, Product Owner or similar software product role.
• A track record of delivering software products to demanding timescales.
• Strong planning, organisational and dependency management skills.
• Experience working closely with Agile software development teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Confidence working with third-party suppliers and influencing without direct authority.
• A commercial mindset with a strong focus on customer value.
• The ability to stay organised, solve problems and make informed decisions in a fast-moving environment.

Experience of payments, financial services or transactional platforms is a strong preference for this role, given its focus on our payments platform.

At Gladstone, we believe AI should be part of every Product Manager's toolkit.

We encourage our teams to use AI responsibly to improve research, analysis, planning, documentation and communication, helping us deliver better products, faster. We're looking for people who are curious about new technology and continually explore better ways of working.