Kobalt Intro:

​Kobalt is one of the world’s largest, most innovative music companies, using technology to power creative freedom, transparency, ownership and control for artists, songwriters, publishers, and labels. 

Founded in 2000 by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Adhitz, the startup built a platform to maximise efficiency, accuracy, and transparency across the billions of micro-payments collected in today’s highly complex digital world. As the traditional music companies fought technology and contracted, Kobalt embraced it and grew, building an infrastructure and world-class creative team purposely designed to usher in the streaming era, along with a more fair, rewarding music business for creators. 

With over 400 employees in 12 offices around the world, Kobalt today represents over 31,000 artists and songwriters, 700,000 songs and 600 publishing companies. Kobalt is proud to work with artists, songwriters, and companies like Childish Gambino, Max Martin, Paul McCartney and MPL Communications, Disney Music Group, and many more. 

Context: 

Kobalt continues to grow 3x faster than the market and as such has a continuous focus on scaling out its systems, products and services to cope with the increasing demand. This role will sit in our Product, Design and Delivery team and will require someone who is exceptionally T-Shaped; with experience in working both broadly and deeply across multiple initiatives. 

As a Lead Product Manager for Kobalt, you will support the Leadership team with driving strategic thinking, discovery and outcomes across the business. The Lead PM will work effectively with all other disciplines and stakeholders required to bring user-centric products to life. They will lead people through tough business problems and strategy. With strong commercial and influencing skills they will be able to handle a breadth of information and communicate exceptionally.

This role is twofold; they will be across programmes of work as well as strategic initiatives across the business - ensuring we are excellent today as well as future proofing our tomorrow.  They will be the go-to person for all strategic and tactical concerns on the product and business area and drive decisions to resolution. Where appropriate, this may even include the decision to cancel or pivot the entire product.

This role will be responsible for supporting the Head of Product with ensuring we have the right mix of skills in our teams and be a key participant in the organisational structures needed to enable the larger team to both stay organised and execute with autonomy. They will  identify possible collisions and proactively fix them by mediating between teams and finding mutual solutions independent of senior leadership.

Who is the Product organisation?

The Product organisation is made up of four distinct functions: Product Management, Programme & Delivery Management,  UX & Design and Business Analysis. Each of these functions work together to create products and services for our B2C users (songwriters, artists etc) and B2B users (publishing companies and our internal teams, from Creative to Writer & Publisher Relations teams and more) 

Our products and technology have gone through significant transformation over the last few years and, as such this role will provide analysis to further the continuation of this journey whilst maximising business impact and process optimisation across our business.

What you will bring:

• You will have experience working as a Product Leader within the music industry. You will understand how the music industry operates and the aspects of catalogue management, royalty processing and the end to end journey of how music publishing works.
• You will have a real passion for creating clarity out of large, complex areas. You’ll love to work with an array of stakeholders from Creatives to deeply technical developers. You’ll bring the energy to drive change, facilitate conversations and build a connective tissue between Product and the wider business.
• You will bring extensive knowledge of product management methodologies with experience in using your craft to facilitate the understanding of complex tech, product and business problems. 
• You lead on both strategy and execution. You will be responsible for providing leadership to the product managers across the group and driving change across the business.
• You’ll provide strategic analysis to senior stakeholders promoting exceptional change management, documentation and communication skills whilst driving decision making, analytical thinking and support the development process by empowering and mentoring engineers, product managers and delivery managers.
• You’ll be a key part of Kobalt’s Product leadership team; defining our product strategy, making pragmatic recommendations, based on thorough analysis, for our products and fostering understanding across our Product and Technology teams. 
• You will have extensive experience in working with product roadmaps, aligning Product goals to overarching business objectives and analysing scope of work. You will have experience in conducting risk analysis and assessing trade off decisions between conflicting priorities. You will be comfortable using data tools, providing insights and conducting cost/benefit analysis
• You will regularly contribute to product area ’horizontals’ such as team structure, strategic projects, product area wide processes and communication, cultural aspects, and action plans. You will be actively involved in hiring and broader team management; actively coaching, mentoring and helping reports and others grow in their careers

What does success look like:

• You’re able to develop a long term strategy for our Catalogue management applications and execute them effectively within your teams 
• You’re able to facilitate understanding across a broad and diverse mix of stakeholders, using analysis to aid decision making.
• You’ll accrue substantial knowledge of how the industry operates and become a lighthouse for the engineering and product teams & peers around you.
• You will be able to improving core competencies across the Product discipline
• You’re able to align product goals to overarching business objectives and define KPIs against product metrics through to strategy
• You’re able to create clarity from complex business problems, lead cross functional programmes of work and drive product best practice
• You are able to ruthlessly prioritise work for your area as well as across the function
• You show stellar stakeholder management of business relationships and take the time to understand business areas and industry context. You leverage company, product and domain knowledge to influence relevant leadership strategic decisions.

What do we offer:

• Salary Range: Discuss with the Talent Partner. 
• Flexible working. KTech operates with a hybrid working policy (fully remote possible). 
• 25 days annual. 
• 1 well being day per quarter.  
• Half day summer Fridays (July and August). 
• Christmas closure.
• Meeting free Fridays afternoon outside of the summer months. We use this as dedicated learning time. 
• 5% pension contribution. 
• Health Insurance. 

Interview Process and our commitments to you:

1. Recruiter Call (30mins)
2. Hiring Manager Call (60 mins) 
3. Presentation to a selection of Product Leadership team and business stakeholders (90 mins) 
4. Cultural Round (30-45mins) 
5. Interview with Laurent Hubert, CEO (30 mins)

• We are committed to completing the process in 3 working weeks and are willing to be flexible to meet the candidates requirements. 
• We are also committed to providing feedback on each interview no longer than 24hrs after the interview via email, telephone call or ZOOM.