Technical Product Manager - Schedule Studio

Job description

If you're a planner who thinks schedules should be built differently and wants to build the tool that does it, join nPlan… Take planning past the Gantt chart - Schedule Studio is an AI-native way to author construction schedules. It's already generating and challenging programmes on major projects, and it is changing how planners have worked for a generation. Bring what you know from the tools - years of P6 and Asta, of building logic, defending float, and sitting through baseline reviews; that experience is exactly what the product needs at its centre. Lead, and build, for real - run the Schedule Studio squad, plan its quarter, ship with your own hands (and your agents'), and take on more scope as fast as you can earn it. Ready to change how the world's biggest projects get planned? nPlan has built a unique AI platform that turns the data behind major construction projects into decisions their leaders can act on - forecasting delay and cost risk on some of the world's most important infrastructure (HS2, Heathrow, Sizewell C and more), and helping the people running those projects decide what to do about it. Behind that is a machine learning capability trained on one of the largest datasets of construction schedules in existence - hundreds of thousands of real programmes - and built by a world-class engineering and research team recognised as a MacRobert Prize finalist, the UK's top engineering award. Schedule Studio is where that capability meets the planner's desk. Instead of building a programme activity by activity, a planner describes the scope and Schedule Studio produces a credible, logic-linked schedule that they can interrogate, shape, and export to P6. Today it is used to produce a first credible schedule in hours rather than weeks at bid and early-definition stage, to sense-check a contractor's submitted programme before it's signed, to generate alternative delivery sequences when a project needs recovering, and to give a planning team a running start in a sector they haven't worked in before. Our ambition is for it to become the authoring tool for construction schedules, with the traditional tools left as export destinations. We are hiring a planner to lead it. The role: read this part carefully This is a product role, but we are not asking for a career product manager. We are asking for someone who has built and defended real schedules on real projects, who has strong opinions about what a good programme looks like and what a bad one hides, and who is ready to put that judgment into a product rather than into one project at a time. If you have product experience, great. If you don't, we will teach you the product craft - we cannot teach you years of planning. We don't run product management the way most companies do. AI has collapsed the cost of building software, so we've rebuilt how we work around a simple idea: when execution is cheap, judgment is the scarce resource. For Schedule Studio, the scarce judgment is a planner's: whether a generated sequence is buildable, whether the logic holds, whether the durations are honest, whether a client's planning manager would accept it. We organise into squads of 2–3 people, and everyone in a squad is a contributor. There is no "write the spec and wait," no design-and-handover. As Technical Product Manager for Schedule Studio, you lead the squad. You're accountable for planning its quarter: you own the mission, reconcile priorities when unplanned work lands, and have genuine authority to make trade-offs - including saying "not this quarter." And you build. You'll prototype with AI tools, direct agents, review and edit generated code and generated schedules, and take ideas to working tests in days, not weeks. Increasingly, the product itself is agents. Our direction is to move from tools that help people plan to the AI that does the planning - agents that read the scope, build the programme, spot what's wrong with it, and propose what to do, with the planner signing off rather than doing the legwork. You'll design these agents: what they should do, what they must never do, and where the planner stays in the loop when the consequences are measured in years and billions. And because you can't ship an agent you can't measure, evals sit at the centre of how we work . For Schedule Studio that means deciding what a "good schedule" is in terms a machine can score - logic density, open ends, float distribution, milestone realism, resemblance to what experienced planners actually produce - and proving every change against it. Nothing counts as done until a structured evaluation shows it's actually better. What you'll do Be the planner in the room: you are the standard for what Schedule Studio produces. Review generated programmes the way you'd review a contractor's submission, find what's wrong, and turn that into product and model improvements. Own the definition of schedule quality across the product. Own the squad's quarter: plan it, reconcile it against unplanned work and support demands, and deliver it. Make build/kill decisions on evidence, and know what value a piece of work will create - and how you'll measure it - before you build it. Build, not just brief: write clear specs, prompt agents effectively, and review and edit generated code and output rather than writing from scratch or handing over. Keep idea-to-test in days by choosing the cheapest path to a valid test. Design and ship planning agents: decide what an agent should do (build the programme, challenge the logic, propose a recovery sequence), what it must never do, and where the planner stays in the loop. Shape the context, tools, and guardrails it works with - including how it uses project data, templates, and the P6 export. Run evals - this is central to what we do: define what a good schedule looks like before you build, then prove it with structured evaluations - representative project sets, scoring rubrics a senior planner would agree with, and success metrics covering quality, cost, and reliability. A schedule that looks plausible but a planning manager would reject doesn't ship. Kill things fast when the evidence says so; we measure ourselves in outcomes shipped and experiments correctly killed. Get close to planners and the people they answer to: run user and buyer research with planning managers, project controls leads, and programme directors; sit in on client and sales meetings; and treat real feedback from working planners as your most valuable input. Our clients run multi-billion-dollar projects and carry real accountability for them; understanding their world is the job - and you already do. Lead contributors, not a process: lead your squad to decisions and delivery with no handovers, coordinate dependencies with the squads working on forecasting, portfolio, and our AI agent, and spread what your squad learns through our guilds (our cross-squad groups for frontend, backend, and AI practice). Please mention the word ' float ' in your application. What we're looking for Five-plus years as a planner or scheduler on major construction or infrastructure projects - building, maintaining, and defending programmes that were contractually and commercially live, not just reporting on them. Deep fluency in Primavera P6 (Asta, MSP, or TILOS a bonus): logic, calendars, constraints, baselines, WBS and coding structures, and the many ways a schedule can look fine and be wrong. You can read a programme and tell within minutes whether you'd trust it. A clear point of view on schedule quality - you can articulate what makes a programme credible, know the common quality checks (and where they fall short), and have argued about float across the table and held your ground. You already build with AI, daily: you've used LLM tools to draft, analyse, or automate parts of your own work, and you want to go much further - to prototypes and working code you review and edit rather than write from scratch. Judgment over process: you can take an ambiguous problem, get to the heart of what planners and their clients actually need, and make the right call because you understand the trade-offs, not because you followed a framework. You're fluent with data: you use it to find the problem worth solving and to know whether what you shipped actually worked - and you're excited by the idea of defining schedule quality in a way that can be measured at scale. You communicate sharply: you can make a complex trade-off legible to an engineer, a planning manager, and a programme director in the same afternoon. You've changed your mind on evidence. You can point to a sequence, a plan, or an approach you believed in, what the data told you, and what you did about it. The problems are hard, the stakes are real, and the path isn't always clear - you're energised by that, not slowed down by it. Nice to have Product experience of any kind - owning a feature area, a tool, or an internal system that other planners depended on - or experience building planning tooling, scripts, or automation for your team. Experience with data science, machine learning, or probabilistic risk analysis (QSRA/QCRA), and comfort talking about forecasting, uncertainty, and probabilities. Experience working across both client and contractor sides, or across multiple sectors (rail, energy, nuclear, water, buildings, oil and gas). Knowledge of contract programme requirements under NEC, JCT, FIDIC, or similar, and of what "acceptance" of a programme actually involves. Some formal technical background (engineering, development, or data). What working at nPlan will be like We are still a relatively small team, so there is plenty of opportunity for a high degree of ownership and growth over different areas of the product, and you will be directly exposed to all areas of the business. Meaningful equity - you're taking on real ownership, and we want you to share in what you help build. Generous paid holiday, because time with the people and things you care about matters. Flexible working hours and a genuinely flexible remote setup - into the Shoreditch office just 1–2 times per month (or as often as you'd like), plus quarterly company get-togethers. Regular lunches, socials and opportunities to connect as a team. A Learning & Development budget, strong Health & Wellbeing support, and generous family leave. Your voice will always be heard. What you do or say counts, not who you are or where you're from. We are a cross-disciplinary team, and come from all backgrounds and cultures. We have three core values that underlie everything we do: Learn from Everything · Be Radically Truthful · Aim High, Run Fast. These enable us to create a collaborative, inclusive environment where we can move effectively and efficiently to implement the best solutions. We are working hard to create a workplace that is inclusive to everyone, no matter their background, or where they are in life. We believe that only a truly diverse place can create great products that serve a wide audience and improve the world. We believe in equality of opportunities and that's why we make sure that these ideas are reflected in our values, and that we really apply these in all aspects of our company culture. If you have a need for any adjustments during our interview process, let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them. Hiring process Intro call (Product team member) (15 min) Planning deep-dive: walk us through a programme you built and defended (CTO) (45 min) Practical exercise: generate a schedule in Schedule Studio, tell us what's wrong with it, and show us how you'd measure it (CTO & squad member) (60 min) Values Alignment call (60 min) On-site (half a day, can be remote) If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.