Product Manager. End of play: July 30, 2025 | Crossref

Do you want to help improve research communications in all corners of the globe? Come and join the world of nonprofit open infrastructure and be part of improving the creation and sharing of knowledge as our new Product Manager.

• Location: Remote and global, availability from 2-5pm UTC Monday through Friday to ensure sufficient overlap with the rest of the team
• Type: Full-time
• Remuneration: 85-90k USD or local equivalent. Note this is a general guide (as there is no universal currency) and local currency analysis will take place before the final offer.
• Reports to: Program Lead, Sara Bowman
• Timeline: Advertise in July and offer in August-September.

About the role

Crossref doesn’t take a traditional product management approach, but develops its products and services through three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need. The three programs focus on Co-creation and Community Trends, Contributing to the Research Nexus, and Open and Sustainable Operations.

The Product Manager would join the Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO) program. This program manages and oversees all activities related to making our operations more open, transparent, and sustainable. This program focuses on supporting and strengthening the core functions our members rely on and enabling future growth. It includes metadata deposit and processing, most apps for e.g. managing titles, authentication, and architectural and infrastructural projects. This program also includes modernising our operations in general, which is not just technology but also finance and human resources, so projects like membership process automation, financial analyses, and business system integrations.

We are a small team with a big impact, and we’re looking for a creative, technically-oriented Product Manager to join us to help us with the rebuild of our content system and related services. Reporting to the OSO Program Lead, the Product Manager will take a coordinating role in rebuilding the current Crossref content system and will convene relevant internal and external stakeholders to drive this project forward. Being community-led means the Product Manager is not always the expert in what they are developing, so the ability to plan, research, convene, listen, and facilitate consensus-based decisions is a key factor to being successful in this role at Crossref.

Key responsibilities

• Coordinate work across teams at Crossref within the OSO program, by communicating ideas and writing project plans, gathering and assessing feedback, and using data to drive decision-making
• Build a strong understanding of Crossref’s existing systems to develop a vision for Crossref’s future systems
• Integrate usability studies, user research, system investigations, and ongoing community feedback into requirements
• Write product specifications based on internal and external input, and work closely with the technical team to get these translated into technical specifications
• Prioritise work within a large project and ensure all relevant teams collaborate to stick to the specified timelines
• Influence the product development strategy by communicating priorities based on organisational needs and community feedback
• Define goals, methods, and metrics for the adoption of features and functionality to track success
• Promote the adoption of new services and features directly with the community

About you

• You think in terms of the big picture, but you can work closely with others to explain context and deliver on the details
• You can turn a range of inputs into solid action plans and achievable chunks of work
• You have strong project management skills and can coordinate projects across people and teams
• You have an understanding and experience of complex workflow systems, writing clear specifications, and working with APIs
• You have experience working with developers. You are technical enough to discuss critical questions about architecture and product choices with engineers
• You do whatever it takes to make your product and community successful and love to problem solve, whether that means writing a QA plan, tracking down the root cause of a user’s frustration or working with our data science & dev teams to spin up and test a POC in response to an idea
• You care about open infrastructure and want to make scholarly communications better
• You communicate with empathy and precision
• You are able to clearly articulate your point of view and say no if needed