Principal, Product Management

Role Summary

Nebula is Pearson’s enterprise Product Design System: a shared platform of reusable components, semantic tokens, standards, tooling, and governance that enables product teams to build high-quality, accessible, brand-aligned and AI-ready experiences faster.

Pearson has already demonstrated the value of this model through PLS, including measurable reductions in component-development effort, embedded WCAG 2.2 accessibility, and faster enterprise-wide change. The next challenge is scaling Nebula from a successful system into a durable enterprise capability adopted across Pearson’s products and business units.

As Principal Product Manager for Nebula, you are the senior product leader responsible for turning Nebula’s enterprise vision into an outcome-driven platform roadmap, adoption strategy, and measurable business value.

You partner closely with the Director of Design Systems, who leads Nebula’s system vision, experience and craft strategy, standards, governance, and design/engineering capability. Together, you operate Nebula as an enterprise product—not a component library or downstream service.

Your focus is to make sure Pearson is building the right shared capabilities, for the right consuming teams, in the right sequence—and that adoption produces measurable value.

What You Own

1. Enterprise Product Strategy & Roadmap

Translate Nebula’s enterprise vision into an evidence-led product strategy and prioritized multi-year roadmap.

You will

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• Co-own the enterprise Nebula roadmap with the Design Systems Director, translating system strategy into product outcomes, initiatives and sequencing.
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• Define the problems Nebula should solve across Pearson’s business units and product portfolios.
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• Prioritize investments across reusable components, platform capabilities, adoption tooling, AI-enabled workflows, Platinum/brand integration and emerging Content/AI needs.
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• Establish clear product hypotheses, success measures and decision criteria before major investments.
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• Balance enterprise standardization against legitimate product and technical differences across consuming teams.
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• Maintain a transparent roadmap connecting investment → capabilities → adoption → measurable enterprise value.

1. Adoption Product Strategy & BU Onboarding

Treat adoption as a product problem, not a communications or change-management exercise.

You will

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• Segment Pearson products and business units by readiness, compatibility, value opportunity and migration complexity.
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• Partner with BU Product and Engineering leaders to turn interested teams into roadmap-committed adopters with named products, dates, owners and scope.
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• Lead discovery with consuming teams to understand adoption friction, unmet platform needs and migration barriers.
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• Design the end-to-end Nebula adoption experience: evaluation → commitment → onboarding → migration → contribution → ongoing consumption.
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• Define scalable pilots and onboarding models before expanding enterprise-wide.
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• Use adoption feedback to shape platform roadmap priorities.
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• Partner with Program Management on intake and migration sequencing while retaining product accountability for what and why.

1. Outcomes, Telemetry & Value Measurement

Own the evidence that proves Nebula is working.

You will

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• Establish the Nebula measurement framework with leading and lagging indicators.
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Define telemetry for

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• active products using Nebula
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• component reuse
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• avoided bespoke rebuilds
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• adoption and migration velocity
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• accessibility readiness
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• design-to-code fidelity
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• rebrand propagation time
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• product-development capacity released
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• Create dashboards that allow the central team, BU teams and executives to see adoption and value.
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• Validate assumptions in the business case against real adoption data.
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• Use evidence to stop, change or accelerate investments.
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• Build the product-level evidence required to continuously strengthen Nebula’s enterprise investment case.

1. Discovery & Platform Customer Insight

• Build continuous discovery into the operation of the design system.
• Your “customers” include designers and engineers, but also Product leaders, accessibility teams, AI teams, Brand, and business units consuming the platform.

You will

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• Run ongoing generative and evaluative discovery with consuming teams.
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• Identify recurring problems that should become shared enterprise capabilities rather than local solutions.
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• Determine where standardization creates leverage and where flexibility is required.
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• Validate high-value component, workflow and platform opportunities before committing significant central-team capacity.
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• Create feedback mechanisms that allow BU contributions and needs to flow back into Nebula.
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• Turn qualitative customer insight and telemetry into roadmap decisions.
• The original Principal PM role’s strength in continuous discovery should stay; its purpose simply shifts from coaching other PMs to directly improving Nebula.

1. Prioritization & Product Operating Model

Create the product discipline that allows a specialized platform team to make high-quality trade-offs.

You will

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• Own Nebula prioritization and outcome-based backlog management.
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Establish clear criteria for

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• platform investments
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• component requests
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• migrations
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• contribution proposals
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• exceptions
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• enterprise versus BU-specific work
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• Partner with the Director, Principal Engineer and discipline leads on roadmap and release planning.
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• Ensure roadmap commitments reflect available team capacity and enterprise value.
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• Convert ambiguous enterprise asks into appropriately sized discovery and delivery increments.
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• Maintain decision traceability from customer problem → investment → outcome.