Product Owner

This is a rare opportunity to join PA Media Group's new AI Enablement team as a founding transformation consultant who happens to understand product development. You're not here to maintain backlogs and run sprints - you're here to hunt for business processes ripe for AI disruption, rapidly prototype new ways of working, and facilitate organisational change at pace.

You'll work across our PA Media, Alamy, Podium, StreamAMG, and Press Release & Marketing Services businesses, mapping current processes, identifying inefficiencies, and designing AI-enabled alternatives that deliver outcomes faster, cheaper, or better. Think management consultant meets product innovator - you'll facilitate workshops, build business cases, prototype solutions, and drive adoption of new ways of working.

This role suits an enlightened Product Owner who's delivered AI transformation, or a sharp consultant with hands-on AI implementation experience - someone who can read a room as well as they can engineer a prompt, who builds enthusiasm through demonstration rather than presentation, and who has the commercial acuity to speak the language of different stakeholders.

The Opportunity.

This is a founding team member role - you'll help establish the culture, processes, and ways of working for this new unit. We're deliberately keeping the team small and agile, working with minimal bureaucracy and maximum autonomy. You'll operate with the freedom to experiment, fail fast, and scale successes without navigating layers of approval.

Our diverse portfolio gives you rare breadth for impact and intellectual variety - from breaking news that moves markets (PA Media) to visual content licensing at massive scale (Alamy), from sports data powering betting decisions (Podium) to streaming platforms serving millions (StreamAMG) and press release distribution connecting organisations with audiences (Press Release & Marketing Services). Each business presents unique opportunities where your rapid prototyping can unlock immediate value.

The challenges you'll tackle matter beyond quarterly results: helping society distinguish truth from fabrication, empowering journalists with AI augmentation rather than replacement, and proving that heritage institutions can lead transformation rather than merely survive it. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and enduring values, where success means delighting internal stakeholders, driving operational excellence, and rapidly validating new product opportunities that strengthen our competitive position.

Core Responsibilities

• Hunt and map transformation opportunities
  across our business units through continuous stakeholder engagement and process analysis - identifying where current workflows create friction, waste time, or limit capability, then designing AI-enabled alternatives that deliver measurably better outcomes.
• Facilitate rapid discovery and ideation
  using structured workshop techniques to extract deep process knowledge from business teams, challenge assumptions about "how things must be done," and co-create AI-enabled solutions that stakeholders believe in because they helped design them.
• Move at pace through rapid proof-of-concept cycles
• prototype AI-enabled process improvements in days, validate with actual users in their working environment within weeks, and scale successes quickly using lean approaches that eliminate unnecessary friction.
• Build compelling business cases
  that secure commitment by quantifying expected value across efficiency gains, quality improvements, and new capabilities unlocked - speaking the language of different stakeholders from operational leaders to commercial directors.
• Drive adoption through change management
• you're not just delivering prototypes, you're facilitating organisational transformation, ensuring new AI-enabled ways of working actually get adopted and deliver the promised value.
• Own the opportunity backlog with ruthless prioritisation
  focused on rapid value delivery, making pragmatic trade-offs that balance quick wins against strategic transformation initiatives, killing experiments that don't demonstrate value.
• Drive initiatives from concept through to production
  using rapid delivery approaches that enable fast learning, pivot quickly when assumptions prove wrong, and scale aggressively when solutions demonstrate clear value.
• Educate and engage business stakeholders
  on AI potential and risks, building informed enthusiasm whilst establishing appropriate governance that enables innovation without compromising our commitment to trust and integrity.

Strategic Contributions

• Rapidly prototype breakthrough solutions using agentic AI tools, proving value through working demonstrations that stakeholders can experience directly - turning scepticism into excitement through tangible results rather than theoretical discussions.
• Create self-service AI capabilities that democratise access across the organisation - building prompt libraries, configuration templates, and low-code solutions that enable teams to solve their own challenges without waiting for engineering resources.
• Establish lightweight frameworks for responsible and ethical AI deployment that protect against risks without creating bureaucratic overhead - enabling teams to experiment safely whilst maintaining the trust our customers depend upon.
• Champion AI adoption through compelling workshops and facilitation - you're exceptional at reading a room, building consensus, navigating organisational politics, and maintaining momentum even when stakeholders have competing priorities or resist change.
• Continuously scan the AI horizon for emerging capabilities, experimenting with new tools and techniques to identify opportunities before competitors recognise them.

Essential Skills

• Sharp intellect and commercial acuity
  that enables you to quickly grasp complex business processes, identify leverage points for transformation, and articulate value in language that resonates with diverse stakeholders - from operational efficiency with operations leaders to revenue opportunities with commercial directors.
• Exceptional facilitation and communication skills
  that build enthusiasm and drive consensus - you run workshops that energise participants, navigate organisational dynamics with political savvy, maintain momentum through inevitable obstacles, and secure commitment from stakeholders who initially resist change.
• Process analysis and redesign expertise
• you can map current-state processes with forensic detail, identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks with fresh eyes, and design future-state workflows that leverage AI capabilities to achieve dramatically better outcomes. You ask "why do we do it this way?" until you understand the real constraints versus inherited assumptions.
• Hands-on AI implementation experience
  delivering business transformation - you've moved beyond theory to actually deploy AI solutions that changed how organisations work, learned from failures quickly, and scaled successes aggressively. You understand what works in practice versus what sounds good in presentations.
• Strong AI literacy with practical prototyping capability
• you're fluent with modern AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), can engineer effective prompts, understand capabilities and limitations well enough to identify opportunities, and can build quick prototypes that prove concepts (though the FDE handles sophisticated implementation).
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace in a newly formed team
• you thrive in environments with minimal process, create structure where needed without adding unnecessary friction, and maintain momentum when the path forward isn't immediately clear. You make confident decisions with incomplete information.
• Proven stakeholder influence without relying on positional authority
• you build enthusiasm through demonstration rather than presentation, secure commitment through rapid value delivery, and maintain trust even when experiments fail. You understand that transformation is about people, not just technology.
• Commercial judgment about prioritisation
• you instinctively understand the difference between impressive innovations and value-creating transformations, making pragmatic trade-offs that balance business impact against implementation complexity and organisational readiness for change.

Desirable Skills

• Experience working within media, content, or data-intensive industries where you've seen the challenges of scale, quality, and trust firsthand.
• Background in management consulting, business process reengineering, or operational transformation that gives you structured frameworks for analysing and redesigning workflows.
• Understanding of change management methodologies and organisational psychology that informs how you drive adoption of new ways of working.
• Experience navigating matrix organisations or working across multiple business units with distinct cultures, priorities, and commercial models.
• Proficiency with tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Miro, or similar platforms for process mapping, workshop facilitation, and knowledge management.
• Background in journalism, content operations, or related fields that gives you intuition for editorial workflows and content quality challenges.