Product Manager
Location: Flexible (with travel to offices as required)
The Role
Our clients are seeking an experienced and forward-thinking Product Manager to take ownership of their newly implemented practice management / finance system and drive its ongoing adoption, optimisation, and value realisation across the firm.
This is a strategic and delivery-focused role responsible for defining and maintaining the product roadmap, developing and prioritising the project backlog, and ensuring continuous enhancement of the system and its related finance and operational processes. You will coordinate an internal and external delivery ecosystem — development, business analysis, training, and vendor partners — to deliver regular improvements that meet the evolving needs of a 1000-person, multi-office law firm.
This is a pivotal position shaping how the company leverages its practice management platform to improve efficiency, enable data-driven insight, streamline financial processing, and support their legal teams in delivering exceptional client service.
Key Responsibilities
- Product Ownership & Strategy
- Own the end-to-end product vision, strategy, roadmap, and enhancement programme.
- Develop and maintain a structured list of enhancements, fixes, integrations, modules, and configuration changes.
- Prioritise enhancements based on business value, risk, user impact, and alignment with firm strategy.
- Monitor relevant legal-sector finance system trends and ensure PMC remains aligned with evolving platform capabilities.
- Change Delivery & Continuous Improvement
- Lead the delivery of enhancements, including requirements definition, solution design, testing, and release planning.
- Drive process review and optimisation, ensuring technology, workflows, and business processes remain aligned.
- Manage regular release cycles, patches, upgrades, and module implementations.
- Coordinate with development resources (internal or external) on customisations, integrations, and API-based enhancements.
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Act as the primary point of contact between Finance, IT, legal operations, and other stakeholders on system functionality.
- Champion user experience, gathering requirements, understanding pain points, and identifying improvement opportunities.
- Communicate roadmap priorities, progress, and release updates to stakeholders at all levels.
- Team Leadership & Collaboration
- Coordinate and guide the work of Business Analysts, trainers, developers, data specialists, and support teams.
- Work closely with Finance leadership and IT to ensure system alignment and operational efficiency.
- Partner with L&D to oversee the design and delivery of user training programmes for new features or upgraded modules.
- System Governance, Quality & Support
- Maintain strong governance across configuration, data integrity, and security.
- Ensure robust documentation of business processes, system design decisions, integrations, and technical configurations.
- Oversee and support triage of system issues, working with support teams and vendor contacts to resolve them efficiently.
- Ensure compliance with regulatory, audit, and financial control requirements.
- Vendor & Partner Management
- Act as the firm’s key relationship manager with system vendors and third-party providers.
- Oversee vendor deliverables, service performance, and escalation handling.
- Evaluate new modules, enhancements, and third-party add-ons to determine suitability and ROI for PMC.
Essential Skills & Experience Required
- Significant experience working with legal practice management or finance systems.
- Deep understanding of finance processes in law firms (billing, WIP, collections, matter management, time entry, expenses).
- Demonstrable experience leading enhancements, upgrades, integrations, or optimisation projects.
- Experience defining product enhancements, prioritising requirements, and managing iterative delivery cycles.
- Excellent stakeholder management skills, operating confidently at all levels including partners and senior leadership.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Experience working with technical teams (e.g., SQL, reporting, development, API integration) and translating business requirements into technical deliverables.
Desirable Skills & Experience
- Experience with enterprise practice management platforms and related tooling (e.g., API suites, workflow design tools, document automation, reporting platforms).
- Strong knowledge of finance system modules such as billing, collections, time recording, expenses, workflows, and reporting.
- Experience with structured financial data, SQL Server, SSRS, T-SQL.
- Experience within professional services or legal environments.
- Experience managing or coordinating cross-functional delivery teams.
Personal Attributes
- Collaborative, proactive, and user oriented.
- Able to balance strategic thinking with hands-on delivery leadership.
- Comfortable in a fast-moving environment and able to manage competing priorities.
- Strong communicator, able to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
- Detail-oriented with a continuous improvement mindset.