Associate Product Manager, Platform

Who are Picnic & what do we do?

Picnic's mission is to drive a higher quality ad-funded internet. Today, a large proportion of digital advertising is ineffective, intrusive and poorly optimised. Picnic builds technology that helps brands make better decisions about where and how their advertising is shown, improving outcomes for users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We're a fast growing, founder-led startup. Over the last couple of years we've built PIQ into one of the strongest independent media quality datasets for the open web, and turned it into a profitable data licensing business, with our data now running inside the platforms where media is bought and sold.

We're now focused on commercialising that platform: growing our licensing partnerships, extending our measurement into YouTube and CTV, and using our quality data to directly improve advertiser outcomes.

This is our first Associate Product Manager role, and it sits at the centre of that.

What will you be doing as an Associate Product Manager?

You'll report to our Chief Product & Technology Officer and take ownership of how we measure and monitor the health of the PIQ data platform: the system that measures the quality of the open web and powers everything else we sell.

You will:

• Own how we measure and report platform health, covering the coverage, freshness and accuracy of our data across our priority markets
• Help keep our core data acquisition running to the standard our products depend on
• Investigate the data yourself - when coverage drops or a number looks wrong, you'll write the query or the script to find out why rather than raising a ticket and waiting
• Support delivery of our data licensing partnerships, helping get our data live, integrated and genuinely in use with the platforms that license it
• Contribute to the new quality signals our advertiser products depend on, gathering the requirements and helping shape how we build them
• Write clearly: specifications, decision records, and the reasoning behind them

You'll sit close to engineering and close to the commercial side of the business. Much of this work has not had a dedicated owner before, so there's real scope to shape how it gets done.

Requirements

Who are we looking for?

We're looking for someone technical, curious and comfortable with data, who wants to build a product career somewhere small enough that their work is visible. You don't need product experience - you do need to be able to get into a dataset and come out with an answer.

You will:

• Have a STEM degree, or equivalent evidence that you think rigorously: maths, engineering, computer science, physics, statistics or similar
• Be able to write SQL and Python well enough to interrogate and analyse data independently
• Have clarity of thought and structured thinking, and be able to make decisions when the picture is incomplete
• Be able to create order where there isn't any, and work a problem through without someone standing over you
• Communicate clearly with engineers and with commercial colleagues, and know when to adjust for the audience
• Be genuinely interested in how technology and systems work

Familiarity with advertising technology is a bonus, but not required. Programmatic advertising has a lot of jargon and not much mystery, we'll teach you.

If you don't tick every box, don't rule yourself out. We care more about how you think than about what you've already done.

Benefits

Why work at Picnic?

You'll be joining at the point where a strong technical platform becomes a commercial business, and your work will be visible in that.

At Picnic:

• You'll have real ownership early - this isn't a rotation scheme or a shadowing year
• You'll work directly with our CPTO and closely with the founder and leadership team, whilst having the opportunity to learn from other Product Managers
• You'll learn programmatic advertising from the inside, at a company whose entire product is data
• Ideas move quickly from concept to production - we value momentum, learning, and impact

What can Picnic offer you?

We're proud to have been recognised by Culture100 and Flexa as one of the best and most flexible small businesses to work for. We offer:

• A flexible, hybrid working setup, with regular time together in our Bankside office
• 33 days holiday - inclusive of Bank Holidays - plus additional Christmas shutdown
• Private Medical Insurance
• Inclusive parental leave policy
• A great office, regular socials, Picnic Thursdays, Summer Fridays and 'Work from Roam' opportunities

Salary: £30-40k