Product Manager – Search & Discover
Reporting to: Head of Product
Location: Remote UK
Owning the discovery experience for the world's leading digital preservation platform
Preservica is trusted by governments, archives, libraries and enterprises worldwide to safeguard critical digital information for the long term. As we evolve our platform, the ability to find, surface and make sense of preserved content is becoming more important than ever.
For archivists, records managers and their users, discovery has historically meant knowing exactly what you're looking for: precise metadata, correct catalogue references, exact file names. Finding content across large, heterogeneous collections has required significant manual effort, specialist knowledge, and time that most institutions don't have. AI is changing that fundamentally. Semantic search, natural language querying, and intelligent classification are making it possible to surface relevant content even when users don't know the right terminology, metadata is incomplete, or collections span decades of inconsistent cataloguing practice. For Preservica's customers, this is a step change in what digital preservation actually delivers.
We are looking for a Product Manager to own Search & Discovery and lead the work of making that step change real.
The Role
You will own the Search & Discover product domain, working directly with an engineering delivery team as part of a leadership triad alongside a Tech Lead and Agile Delivery Manager. The Tech Lead owns technical decisions. The ADM owns delivery process. You own the what and the why.
Preservica is at the forefront of bringing AI capabilities into digital preservation, an industry where the technology is genuinely new and the problems are hard. This role sits at the centre of that work. You will be defining and validating how capabilities like semantic search, natural language querying, and AI-assisted relevance ranking can solve real problems for archivists, records managers and their users — grounded in discovery research, not assumption. This means understanding both the user workflows where AI can genuinely help and the contexts where it introduces risk or needs careful design.
Your primary focus is discovery: understanding how users search, browse, and surface content across different workflows and institutional contexts, and translating that understanding into a backlog that the delivery team can execute with confidence.
What You'll Do
- Own Search & Discover as a product domain, developing deep understanding of the jobs-to-be-done for archivists, records managers and their users, and using that understanding to drive the roadmap and influence platform-level priorities
- Lead discovery through user interviews, prototyping and other research; translate findings into clear problem statements and validate assumptions before committing engineering effort
- Partner with the UX team to prototype and test AI-powered capabilities early, and maintain shared research documentation so findings are accessible and cumulative
- Connect customer needs, product capabilities and business goals, championing user outcomes and translating them into well-formed requirements that the delivery team can execute with confidence
- Own the dialogue between product requirements and technical solutions, partnering with the Tech Lead on feasibility and trade-offs and with the ADM on backlog readiness and sprint cadence
- Anticipate GTM needs and rally stakeholders around the team's work, ensuring launches land well with customer-facing teams and customers understand the value of what's been built
- Understand the competitive landscape for search and discovery in information governance and digital preservation, and use that knowledge to sharpen prioritisation
- Be the subject matter expert for Search & Discover and share learnings with the wider product team, raising the bar for how the team approaches discovery and problem framing
- Leverage AI to be more effective and efficient in your own work, and actively look for opportunities to improve how the wider team works through AI-augmented ways of working
Who We're Looking For
Experience
- At least 12–18 months of product management experience, with genuine ownership of discovery and backlog
- Demonstrable ability to conduct user research and translate findings into prioritised, outcome-oriented backlogs
- Passion for PLG strategies and user-centric product development
- Experience working in an agile delivery environment alongside engineering and design
- Enterprise SaaS experience is a plus; experience in content management, information governance, records management or search-adjacent products is particularly relevant
AI Fluency
- You actively use AI tools to do your job better
- You understand AI capabilities and limitations well enough to make sensible product decisions about AI features
- Experience working on or shipping AI-powered features is a bonus, not a requirement
How You Work:
- You default to the problem before reaching for the solution
- You're comfortable with ambiguity and can make progress before everything is defined
- You communicate clearly to engineering, stakeholders and customers without needing to translate through someone else
- You take ownership of outcomes, not just outputs
Why Preservica
- Help protect the world's digital memory. Our Active Digital Preservation solutions are at the razor's edge of commercial software solutions, and used by leading business, archives, libraries, museums, and government organizations around the world.
- Work with bright and talented innovators
- Dedicated training time to support professional growth
- A flexible working environment with a modern office in Abingdon
Preservica are an Equal Opportunities Employer. Come join us!
