Job Description

Location: USA

Salary: Excellent, on application

Our client, a global leader in scholarly publishing and digital learning solutions, is seeking a visionary Chief Product Officer (CPO) to join their executive leadership team. The CPO will define, lead, and execute the organisations product vision and strategy across a diverse portfolio of digital publishing platforms, services, and education technologies.

This is a pivotal role requiring a deep understanding of the academic publishing ecosystem, including researcher and librarian needs, open science and open access trends, scholarly communication, and the evolving education and digital learning markets.

The successful candidate will drive product innovation, ensure strong market alignment, and deliver sustainable growth while advancing the mission to enhance global knowledge dissemination. A central focus will be on seamless integration across business units, customer experience journeys, and crosssector innovation.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership

• Define and own the global product strategy and roadmap across all publishing and platform offerings, ensuring alignment with business goals, customer needs, and community expectations.
• Partner with the executive team to shape organisational strategy, focusing on digital transformation and global expansion.
• Monitor market and industry trends (e.g., open access and open data mandates, AI in research workflows) to anticipate change and position the organisation as a leader in scholarly communication.
• Develop a cohesive digital product vision across scholarly communication and education sectors, driving growth and future scalability.
• Ensure seamless interoperability across business units (publishing, education, technology, sales, and marketing) to deliver unified, customercentric solutions.

Product Innovation & Development

• Lead the creation of innovative digitalfirst products, platforms, and services that enhance researcher, author, librarian, and educator experiences (e.g., submission and review systems, discovery platforms, analytics tools).
• Champion initiatives in metadata, interoperability, research data services, and AI/MLdriven workflow automation.
• Embed customerfocused design and datadriven decisionmaking throughout all product activities.
• Drive innovation in digital learning and adaptive education technologies to support global education markets.

Operational Excellence

• Oversee endtoend product lifecycle management, from ideation and development through launch and ongoing optimisation.
• Establish robust frameworks for product governance, performance measurement, and portfolio prioritisation.
• Ensure compliance with global industry standards (Crossref, ORCID, DOIs, COUNTER, COPE) and regulatory frameworks around data privacy and ethical AI.

Team & Stakeholder Leadership

• Build, inspire, and lead a highperforming global product organisation, fostering collaboration, innovation, and accountability.
• Partner closely with editorial, technology, sales, and marketing teams to deliver integrated, marketaligned solutions.
• Engage directly with researchers, institutions, funders, and societies to gather insights and strengthen partnerships.
• Support M&A initiatives, leading technology assessments and buildversusbuy evaluations.

Experience & Qualifications

• Proven track record (10+ years) in senior product leadership within scholarly, STM, education technology, or adjacent digital publishing sectors.
• Deep understanding of the academic research lifecycle, publishing workflows, and scholarly communications landscape.
• Experience with open access business models, transformative agreements, and research funding dynamics.
• Strong background in digital product innovation, AI/ML, data analytics, and user experience design.
• Demonstrable success in leading digital learning or edtech product initiatives.
• Familiarity with learning management systems and the evolving education technology ecosystem.
• History of managing complex product portfolios and delivering measurable growth in missiondriven environments.
• Exceptional leadership, influencing, and stakeholder engagement skills across global, matrixed organisations.

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