Product Manager, Finance and Purchasing

Job Title: Product Manager, Finance and Purchasing

Reporting to: Head of Product

Location: Remote

About IMP

At IMP we help Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) take control of their finances. Our MAT-first software is built by people who know the sector inside out. Former trust professionals, finance experts and product specialists are all part of our team. More than half of all MATs in the UK already use IMP to plan with confidence, simplify complex processes and make smarter decisions.

We’re proud to be independent, founder-led and growing fast. Alongside our award-winning products, we’ve built a culture we’re equally proud of. We are ranked as one of the UK’s Top 25 Great Places to Work for mid-sized companies. Respect, collaboration and personal growth sit at the heart of how we work. You’ll find flexibility, support and opportunities to develop here, alongside regular team socials and funded CPD.

Role Description:

IMP's products are trusted by MATs nationwide to manage their finances more efficiently and effectively. Our portfolio spans budgeting, forecasting and reporting in Planner, curriculum financial planning in ICFP, and now Finance and Purchasing, the products that record and control a trust's day-to-day spend. The portfolio is growing, each product serves a loyal and expanding customer base, and each evolves as our customers' needs evolve and as IMP builds its platform ambition.

We are looking for a Product Manager to own IMP Finance and Purchasing, the two products that run a trust's everyday finances. Purchasing helps trusts manage and control their spend. Finance is the transactional system behind it, handling the day-to-day accounting from payment runs to bank reconciliation.

Your job is to deepen and extend these two products as trusts adopt them. That means sharpening what has shipped, validating and delivering the capabilities that will matter most next, and working closely with engineering and design to deliver with rigour and pace. This is a role for someone who combines genuine curiosity about customer problems with the strategic discipline to decide what not to build.

Above all, you will stay close to the user. The trust finance teams and budget holders who work in these products every day are your compass, and a discovery-led understanding of their needs is what shapes what you build.

You will be part of a product team that is actively shifting from reactive delivery to discovery-led development, and you will play a leading role in embedding that change within your squad and modelling it for the wider team.

Key responsibilities:

1. Product Strategy and Vision

• Define and evolve the vision for the Finance and Purchasing products in response to customer insight, market signals, and business goals.

• Own your product roadmap, balancing improvements that deepen the value of what has shipped with new capabilities that extend the products' position in MAT finance and purchasing.

• Collaborate with the Head of Product and leadership to align your products' direction with IMP's broader platform strategy and commercial objectives.

• Maintain a clear view of the competitive landscape across finance and purchasing software, and how your products can continue to differentiate within the MAT sector.

2. Customer Discovery and Insight

• Own discovery for your products, from identifying problem areas and validating hypotheses through to defining success metrics before any build commitment.

• Conduct regular customer interviews, observation sessions, and contextual research with MAT finance teams, business managers and budget holders.

• Synthesise insight from multiple sources, including customer interviews, support data, usage analytics and NPS, into clear problem statements and opportunity assessments.

• Build and test prototypes and lightweight MVPs before committing to build, working iteratively with design to refine solutions based on real user feedback.

• Champion the voice of the customer across the business, ensuring product decisions are grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

3. Roadmap Ownership and Prioritisation

• Own and communicate your product roadmap, making prioritisation decisions that balance customer impact, business value, and technical feasibility.

• Define and monitor key product metrics that validate whether your products are delivering the outcomes customers and the business need, distinguishing leading from lagging indicators.

• Work with engineering and design to translate roadmap priorities into well-scoped delivery cycles with clear acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes.

• Collaborate with other PMs and POs across the IMP product team on cross-product dependencies and shared planning, including where Finance and Purchasing connect to Planner and the wider platform.

4. Delivery Partnership

• Work closely with your engineering squad and designers throughout the delivery cycle, from refining the problem through to reviewing shipped features against defined outcomes.

• Ensure your squad has clear context on what they are building and why, not just how.

• Use AI tooling to improve the quality and speed of specifications, synthesis, and product analysis.

• Monitor product performance post-launch and drive iterative improvements based on data and customer feedback.

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration and Go-to-Market

• Work with Support, Implementation, and Sales to consolidate customer feedback and ensure product developments are well communicated and adopted.

• Partner with Customer Success and Marketing to shape go-to-market activities for significant Finance and Purchasing releases.

• Represent your products' customer perspective in cross-functional conversations, ensuring alignment across the business on priorities and trade-offs.

Skills, experience, and attributes :

• A track record of product management or product ownership in B2B SaaS, typically 4+ years, though we care more about demonstrated capability than an exact year count.

• Demonstrable experience owning an established product, evolving it meaningfully in response to customer need and commercial opportunity.

• Strong customer discovery capability. You have conducted interviews, synthesised insights, and shaped product direction from evidence rather than assumption.

• Experience defining and tracking product metrics to validate impact, including leading indicators that predict retention and adoption.

• Strong prioritisation judgement. You can make and defend difficult trade-off decisions with clarity.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management, including the ability to push back with data and offer alternatives rather than just saying no.

• Comfortable working autonomously in a remote environment and driving forward without close supervision.

• Experience with product management tools ( Monday.com , Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar).

• Active user of AI tooling for product management work and curious about how to apply it further.

• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies.

Desirable:

• Experience in product management of finance, accounting, purchasing, procurement, or spend-management software.

• A strong working understanding of core finance and accounting processes, such as budgeting, nominal and cost centre coding, the requisition-to-invoice cycle, and approval and control workflows, whether gained from building software in this space or from hands-on finance experience.

• Knowledge of MAT budgeting, curriculum financial planning, or school funding workflows.

• Understanding of MAT structures, the UK education landscape, or school finance governance.

• Experience in EdTech, school MIS, or education finance systems.

• Experience working in or alongside sectors where the buyer and the daily user are different people, and where financial controls, approvals and audit trails matter.

• Formal product discovery training (Continuous Discovery Habits, Prod MBA, Product School, or equivalent).

• Experience using Claude for specifications, analysis, and customer insight synthesis, or Lovable for rapid prototyping.

Benefits:

• 27 days of holiday per year plus bank holidays (with a buy option up to an additional 5 days)

• Enhance Maternity and Paternity leave

• AXA Health insurance including dental, optical a nd mental health

• Broadband allowance

• Home office stipend

• Life assurance (4 x basic salary)

• Encouraged and funded CPD