Product Manager — V.Platform

V.Group

Location Country

United Kingdom

Work Location

Glasgow

Who are V? As a global leader in ship management and marine services, we add value to a vessel’s operations. Operating around the clock and around the world, V. gives every client the quality and efficiency they need in every sector. Covering crew management and recruitment, quality ship management and technical services, together with supporting management and commercial services, V. has an unrivalled industry knowledge with performance assured. Our values, We Care, We Collaborate, We Challenge, We are Consistent, We Commit and Deliver, are at the heart of everything we do and they support our strategy of Investing in Talent. We are always interested in making contact with talented individuals - people who will demonstrate our values and deliver great service, for internal and external stakeholders.

Overall Purpose of The Job

The Product Manager — V.Platform sets the direction for the platform the whole of V.Group runs on. Two outcomes decide whether the platform pays for itself.

The first is that we build the right things in the right order. Platform services, the data layer and the integrations must land ahead of the modules that depend on them. Build the right thing late and every team waiting on it builds its own version instead, which is how a platform quietly stops being one.
The second is that our products, our portfolio companies and the businesses we acquire come onto the platform and stay on it. That is where the saving sits. Every business that stays outside keeps a duplicate estate alive at our expense, so making the roll-in happen, and making the case for it, is central to the role rather than a task on the side.

This is a business-level role. This role will set what the platform is for, what it must do, for whom, and in what order. This job does not set the technical how. The Director of Technology & Architecture and the Head of Data Platform own the architecture and the engineering, and they are your standing input on what is realistic and what it costs.
This role reports to the Product Portfolio Director. You line-manage the Product Owner — Data & Dashboards, who converts business demand for data and reporting into delivered work.

Key Responsibilities And Tasks

Platform as a Product

Own the vision, strategy, roadmap and investment case for V.Platform as a horizontal product across ShipSure 3.0, V.Services and the wider Group portfolio.
Own the service catalogue: what each service does, who consumes it, what it costs to run, and when it is ready.
Set the platform’s success measures and report against them. Re-use is the headline measure — what the second and third product did not have to build.
Take the build-once decision when a module asks for its own version of a shared capability. Decide on the business case, with technical input from Architecture and the data platform team.
Prioritise one backlog across competing module, business unit and external customer demand, and publish the reasoning behind the order.

Platform Services

Own the roadmap and sequencing of the services pipeline against demand from the Marine, Procurement and Crewing applications, and against the vessel build running from August 2026, so a dependency is ready before the module that needs it.
Hold the line between a module, the data layer and platform services, so that a capability built once for everyone does not reappear inside a module.
Make sure every service ships with a service contract that states the data payload delivered and received. Teams treat that contract as a definition of done, applied at design time.
Own the product decisions inside master data management — vessel, contracts, suppliers, users, crew and location. That covers how we resolve conflicts, how a vessel requests a change it cannot make itself, and how vetted data reaches the applications and the ship.
Establish the estimating basis for a services pipeline with no track record, and tighten it as the first services complete.

Data as a Product

Own the product remit for the governed data layer: which data products are certified, what they promise on quality, freshness and lineage, and who is entitled to read them.
Set the acceptance thresholds for data quality, and treat data quality as a programme-critical outcome rather than a reporting concern. Decisions taken now carry long-term repercussions.
Own the operating model for gold-layer data as a service, including the MCP interfaces that let AI agents and tooling read under the same permissions as a person.
Own the self-serve surface as a product: the business object catalogue, the data set builder, the report builder, subscriptions and dashboards. A business question should not become a request, a queue and someone else’s week.
Direct the Product Owner — Data & Dashboards, who owns the backlog for business demand for data and reporting.

Bringing the Portfolio onto the Platform

Own the roadmap for moving V.Group products, business units, portfolio companies and acquired businesses onto V.Platform, sequenced by the value released rather than by who asks first.
Build the case for each roll-in, in the terms the business cares about: cost taken out, time saved, duplicate systems retired, and people, data and capability shared instead of rebuilt.
Assess what a candidate business needs before it can come on — the gaps in platform services, the data it brings, the integrations it depends on — and feed that into the platform roadmap, so that onboarding becomes a known path rather than a bespoke programme each time.
Retire the duplicate systems a roll-in makes redundant, and track the benefit actually realised. We bank the saving at decommissioning, not at go-live.

Integration and Interfaces

Own the product roadmap for the Integration Gateway, the Customer API and the Service Provider API, including what V.Group exposes to external fleet operators and to third-party service providers.
Own the product decisions for the off-vessel synchronisation engine, replication, and vessel details push and pull. That includes what a vessel can still do when the link is down, and how it reconciles when the link returns.
Own the product relationship between the platform and the vessel and crew edge — V.Link, V.Connect, V.Crew Connect, the mobile apps and the Shipman client portal.
Set the standard a new integration must meet, and retire duplicated integrations as ShipSure, VMS, OMS and PMS consolidate.

Standards, Governance and Assurance

Set the promise the platform makes on tenancy isolation, so that the separation between the V.Group managed fleet and external fleet operators is demonstrable rather than asserted. The Head of Data Platform owns the model that delivers it.
State what the platform must answer for GDPR and DORA, and make sure the roadmap carries the work to answer it. Support external security review by prospective and existing customers, with the Head of Data Platform and the Group Head of IS Operations, Infrastructure & Security. A failed review is a lost deal.
Own the product side of what an external customer sees, including the theme and white-label editor. Decide what an operator may configure without a code change.

Team and Ways of Working

Line-manage the Product Owner — Data & Dashboards: objectives, development, performance and retention.
Coach that Product Owner into the discipline. We expect to fill the post internally, with someone who has strong V.Group domain knowledge and no prior product experience. Teaching the craft — stories, acceptance criteria, refinement, saying no well — is part of this job rather than an extra.
Grow the platform product capability as V.Platform scales, and say when the work justifies a further Product Owner.
Champion the AI-assisted SDLC and AI-PrDLC across the product lifecycle, and work in a hybrid delivery model across internal squads and outsourced delivery partners.

What can I expect in return? V. Group can offer you a market leading salary and benefits package, in addition to significant opportunities for career growth and personal development. This a great opportunity to join a true leader in the maritime sector - a company that has exciting plans for future growth.

Essential

Track record owning a horizontal platform, shared services layer or internal developer platform as a product, where the customers were other product teams rather than end users.
Experience moving a separate product, business unit or acquired company onto a shared platform, and retiring what it replaced. This is the part of the role that returns the money, and we will probe it.
A commercial habit of mind: able to build a savings case, defend it to a sceptical business, and then show what was actually banked.
Experience owning APIs or integration products consumed by external customers or partners, including the contract, the versioning and the deprecation.
Strong working understanding of data platforms, data modelling, data contracts, BI and data quality. Enough to ask an architect the right question, follow the answer, and turn it into a product decision.
Evidence of making the build-once case successfully, and of prioritising one backlog across competing internal customers with the reasoning published.
Line management experience, and a real appetite for coaching. You will develop a Product Owner who knows the business but is new to product, and their progress is one of your measures.
Strong stakeholder management and excellent written communication, able to argue a platform investment case commercially to architects, engineering leaders and senior business stakeholders who do not report to you.

Desirable

Post-merger integration experience on the digital and data side, including due diligence input on a target.
ERP experience, ideally in maritime, logistics or another asset-intensive domain.
Multi-tenant SaaS platform experience, including selling the same product to internal and external customers.
Experience of master data management as a product, not only as a data discipline.
Practical knowledge of Microsoft Fabric and the Azure estate, and of agent interfaces such as MCP.
Experience of a platform that had to satisfy external customer security review, GDPR or DORA obligations.
Relevant product certification, such as Pragmatic or SVPG.