Product Manager

Position Overview

The Product Manager role will own the end-to-end product strategy and execution for  - a mission critical business asset, directly shaping MDPI’s commercial performance, reputation and operational efficiency. You will be accountable for evolving the platform into a best-in-class scholarly content platform, advancing discoverability, user engagement, AI integration, commercialization and platform performance / reliability. The role will maintain a compelling product strategy, translate business needs into user‑centric solutions and partner closely with product design, platform and AI engineering teams, editorial, marketing and operations to deliver measurable product outcomes.

Product Strategy & Direction

• Own, articulate and communicate a clear product vision and outcome-driven strategy for

• Define and maintain a prioritized product roadmap aligned with MDPI business objectives

• Identify competitive gaps and opportunities through continuous market analysis and competition benchmarking

• Establish success metrics (OKRs/KPIs) and use them to drive prioritization and trade-offs between value / impact, risk, technical feasibility and effort

User & Problem Discovery

• Define core user segments and personas (authors, editors, readers, partners, general public)

• Continuously research and map end-to-end user journeys and identify high-impact friction points

• Lead structured discovery (research, usability testing, experiments) together with Product Design

• Translate insights into well-framed problems, opportunities and testable hypotheses

Delivery & Execution Excellence

• Own backlog prioritization based on value / impact, risk and effort

• Produce high-quality epics and user stories, with clear acceptance criteria

• Partner closely with the solution / delivery and engineering teams to plan, scope and deliver predictably

• Ensure strong standards across UX, accessibility, performance, documentation and quality

Platform Growth & Commercial Impact

• Drive improvements in content discovery, navigation and curation to increase content engagement and user retention

• Partner with marketing, sales and support on launches, adoption and feedback loops

• Shape features that support sustainable monetization and funnel optimization without compromising trust

Data, AI & Platform Quality

• Use quantitative and qualitative data to guide decisions and evaluate outcomes

• Establish and run an experimentation cadence (A/B tests, iterations, learnings)

• Explore and validate responsible AI-assisted capabilities for discovery, personalization and curation

• Monitor and improve platform reliability, performance and content quality signals

• University degree (preferably in Product Management, Computer Science, Business Management or Information Systems)

• Product management experience, including ownership of a complex web platform

• Proven track record delivering user-facing features at scale with measurable business impact

• Experience with content-heavy, discovery-driven or marketplace-style platforms

• Proficiency with Agile tools and workflows (e.g., Jira, road mapping, release planning)

• Advanced knowledge of SEO, accessibility and web performance fundamentals

• Working knowledge of data literacy (experimentation, A/B testing, metrics, telemetry, dashboards)

• Excellent stakeholder management and facilitation across product, technical and business teams

• Curious and continuously learning, particularly in AI-driven product evolution

• High ownership and delivery discipline

A pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing, MDPI has supported academic communities since 1996. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, MDPI has the mission to foster open scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines.

We operate currently over 400 diverse, peer-reviewed, open-access journals supported by over 66,000 academic editors. We serve scholars from around the world to ensure the latest research is openly and broadly available.

Besides our main publishing business, we develop and maintain digital platforms and software ranging from scientific exchange platforms to article databases and search engines, all focused on empowering scholars and giving them the best possible product and service. As of the end of 2022, we count more than 6700 colleagues in 17 offices across 11 countries.

MDPI Serbia was established in 2016 to support the rapid global expansion of MDPI. Over the course of 9 years, we opened 1 office in Belgrade (New Belgrade) and 1 additional office in Novi Sad. We now have over 620+ employees in our 2 Serbian offices, dedicated to ensuring that high-quality research is made available as quickly as possible in different fields of science.

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