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 covers three areas. Planner handles budgeting, forecasting and reporting. ICFP handles curriculum financial planning. Finance and Purchasing are the newest products, and they 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 change 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 and handles day-to-day accounting, from payment runs to bank reconciliation.

This is a complex domain. Accounting rules, approval controls and audit requirements shape every decision, so this role needs someone who has already worked on a finance, accounting or purchasing product and understands how these systems work underneath. You won’t be learning the domain from scratch. You’ll bring that knowledge with you and apply it to the MAT sector.

Your job is to deepen and extend these two products as trusts adopt them. That means sharpening what has already shipped, validating and delivering the capabilities that will matter most next, and working closely with engineering and design to deliver with rigour and pace. You’ll need genuine curiosity about customer problems and 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 use these products every day are your compass. A discovery-led understanding of their needs shapes what you build.

You will join a product team that is moving from reactive delivery to discovery-led development. You’ll play a leading role in embedding that change in 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. Balance improvements that deepen the value of what has shipped against new capabilities that extend the products’ position in MAT finance and purchasing.

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

• Keep a clear view of the competitive landscape in finance and purchasing software, and of how your products can continue to stand out in the MAT sector.

2. Customer Discovery and Insight

• Own discovery for your products: identify problem areas, validate hypotheses and define success metrics before any build commitment.

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

• Bring together insight from customer interviews, support data, usage analytics and NPS, and turn it into clear problem statements and opportunity assessments.

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

• Champion the voice of the customer across the business so that product decisions rest on evidence rather than assumption.

3. Roadmap Ownership and Prioritisation

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

• Define and monitor the product metrics that show whether your products deliver the outcomes customers and the business need, distinguishing leading from lagging indicators.

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

• Work 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 through the whole delivery cycle, from refining the problem to reviewing shipped features against defined outcomes.

• Make sure your squad understands why they are building something, not just what and how, including the accounting and control requirements behind it.

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

• Monitor product performance after 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 bring customer feedback together and make sure product developments are well communicated and adopted.

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

• Represent your products’ customer perspective in cross-functional conversations and keep the business aligned on priorities and trade-offs.

Skills, Experience and Attributes

Essential:

• Product management or product ownership experience on a finance, accounting, purchasing, procurement or spend-management software product. This is a must-have.

• A strong working understanding of core finance and accounting processes, such as nominal and cost centre coding, the requisition-to-invoice cycle, payment runs, bank reconciliation, and approval and control workflows.

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

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

• Strong customer discovery skills: you have run interviews, drawn out 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 difficult trade-off decisions and defend them clearly.

• 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 work forward without close supervision.

• Experience with product management tools such as Monday.com, Jira or Azure DevOps.

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

• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies.

Desirable:

• Hands-on finance experience, for example in a finance team, alongside your product experience.

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

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

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

• Experience in sectors where the buyer and the daily user are different people.

• 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’ holiday per year plus bank holidays, with the option to buy up to 5 additional days

• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave

• AXA Health insurance, including dental, optical and mental health

• Broadband allowance

• Home office stipend

• Life assurance (4 x basic salary)

• Encouraged and funded CPD