Senior Product Manager

Description

As a Senior Product Manager at GS1 Canada, you own a customer experience of considerable scope and complexity — a complete product, a significant platform capability, or an experience that spans several teams. The problem and the strategy may not be defined yet; you use expertise and judgment to set the right goals and design solutions that last.

You work in an empowered product team with engineering, design, business stakeholders, and subscribers. You lead initiatives and deliver independently, seeking direction when you need it, and you influence strategy, adoption decisions, and organizational priorities. You also coach and mentor other product managers.

GS1 Canada has defined a structured product operating model and is rolling it out across teams; this role owns a meaningful part of it.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Understanding

• Act as the voice of the customer, synthesizing needs across diverse subscriber personas and use cases in your scope.
• Engage subscribers directly and watch them use what you have built, rather than relying on second-hand research.
• Separate representative signal from anecdote, and stated requests from the underlying problem, using research, support data, and usage patterns.
• Conduct market research to understand the competitive landscape and size opportunities.

Strategy and Decision-Making

• Define the product vision, problem statement, and strategy for your scope, and own the roadmap and priorities.
• Understand your business context — market dynamics, competitive landscape, pricing, and cost to serve — and connect product decisions to business outcomes.
• Work through business model and pricing implications so your product is financially sustainable while creating subscriber value.
• Reason from first principles and treat reversible decisions differently from irreversible ones: experiment quickly where a choice can be undone, apply rigour where it cannot.
• Make trade-offs and align stakeholders when data is incomplete, deciding with judgment rather than waiting for certainty.

Technical Judgment

• Go deep enough technically to understand not just what a technology does, but the trade-offs it carries.
• Assess technical proposals for risk and reversibility, asking what a design makes harder to change later.
• Balance new capability against system health, recognizing that velocity decisions carry long-term architectural consequences.
• Apply a working understanding of AI and agentic systems to accelerate discovery, delivery, and decision quality.

Design and Customer Experience

• Partner with design and engineering on prototypes, define acceptance criteria, and take part in testing and validation.
• Ground decisions in utility, intuitiveness, and simplicity rather than personal preference.
• Balance compliance, localization, and accessibility requirements against experience quality.
• Manage cross-team dependencies and drive delivery to completion, navigating roadblocks and competing demands.
• Support sprint planning, backlog refinement, user story creation, and UAT.
• Judge when a product is ready to ship, and which simplifications are acceptable.
• Own launches and product performance before and after release, including adoption and continued evolution.

Measurement and Outcomes

• Define success criteria and KPIs, distinguishing output measures such as adoption from outcomes such as satisfaction and business impact.
• Analyze usage, performance, and behavioral data to prioritize investment.
• Monitor operational health after launch and drive unresolved issues to resolution.
• Watch support and operational signals for trends that warrant a roadmap response, rather than treating issues case by case.

Collaboration, Influence, and Mentorship

• Work across engineering, design, data, finance, marketing, account management, legal, and operations to deliver for the customer.
• Influence without authority, building alignment across teams with competing priorities.
• Communicate product progress, decisions, and value clearly to Directors, VPs, partners, and subscribers.
• Produce concise written documents and contribute to annual and mid-year planning and budgeting.
• Mentor and coach product managers on product management practice.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• 6+ years in product management in a SaaS or platform environment, including ownership of a complete product or a significant platform capability.
• Experience setting direction where the problem, opportunity, and strategy were undefined.
• Track record of owning measurable outcomes — adoption, retention, revenue, or operational efficiency — not feature output alone.
• Experience with API-first, data-driven platforms; AI-enabled products and mobile launches are an asset
• Technical fluency to evaluate engineering proposals and assess architectural trade-offs credibly.
• Strong writing: concise strategy narratives, product briefs, and business cases that move decisions forward.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and present to Director and VP audiences.
• Able to design and run market research independently.
• Solid grounding in product discovery, agile delivery, user-centered design, and product analytics
• Knowledge of GS1 standards and GS1 Canada’s solutions, services, and platform, or the ability to build that depth quickly.
• Current on emerging technology, including AI and agentic models, and pragmatic about where it adds value.
• Experience mentoring product managers is not required but is considered an asset.

GS1 Canada is committed to helping all employees, customers, stakeholders and subscribers in an effective and timely manner by preventing and removing barriers for persons with disabilities. Our policies and practices are intended to foster diversity, inclusiveness and accessibility, while also ensuring that the workplace is free from discrimination and harassment.