Freelance Product Manager

At Thread, we’ve set out to rethink the shopping experience from the ground up, helping people feel happier and more self-confident in the process. Using a combination of expert stylists and machine learning algorithms, we bring people a small, highly personalised selection of the perfect clothes just for them – in their size, budget and taste. By doing so we simplify the shopping process, help people to feel more comfortable in their own skin, and allow them to go out into the world with a spring in their step. It also removes the need to spend Saturday afternoons frustrated by busy high street stores, or spend ages browsing the overwhelming number of options available online. We believe having an intelligent assistant in your pocket is how the majority of people will shop in the future, and we’re looking for a talented Product Manager to join us on a freelance basis to supercharge our efforts in helping millions of people discover its value.
The role
We’re looking for a Freelance Product Manager to join us for several months and immediately start working on one of our biggest areas: leading the rebuild and redesign of our Shop. This is a high impact project that will significantly improve the core experience for our users. We’re looking for someone who’s got a talent for developing simple, powerful solutions for user problems. You’ll also be comfortable driving insight from user research and analytics, as well as inspiring your team not just to ship features but to solve problems and deliver true product value. You’ll lead an autonomous, cross-functional team of designers and engineers, owning both the discovery and delivery of valuable features and changes.
This role will be based in our Aldgate office, which has lots of natural light, plants, a relaxed Studio area for co-working with music, and an outdoor terrace for barbecues and working outside when it’s sunny.

Your role will include:

  • Setting clear OKRs and metrics for your team, and being accountable for achieving them
  • Prioritising the work of your team, accounting for the cost, impact, and risk of different opportunities and projects
  • Ensuring everyone has extreme clarity on your team’s progress and plans going forward
  • Driving quantitative insights – defining metrics, gathering insight from A/B testing, and collaborating with analysts to define and answer analytical questions. Ideally, you could also run basic analyses yourself, but this isn’t a hard requirement
  • Driving qualitative insights – talk to users regularly to understand what’s working, what’s not, and help shape our thinking
  • Running your team’s process, optimised for clarity, impact, and sustainable throughput
  • Defining the scope of projects and ensure continual clarity on the spec
  • Helping evolve our processes for how we approach product development and make sure we have the tools we need to maximise efficiency and output
  • Collaborating with stakeholders from around the business on solving problems for their teams and gathering useful insight into your team’s plans and projects

You may be a fit for this role if you…

  • Have experience as a Product Manager, ideally within a consumer-facing company where product is core to the company’s growth strategy
  • Are comfortable communicating a clear, compelling vision for your team’s destination
  • Are incredibly organized; a master of email, task lists and bug tracking systems
  • Value clear prioritisation and maximising the efficiency of the people around you
  • Are smart, confident and form clear opinions
  • Are empathetic, able to balance multiple points of views and have effortless conversations with all functions across the company
  • Care deeply about creating the simplest experience possible, rather than adding features as a solution to problems
  • Love taking ownership of hard problems and are motivated by driving outcomes
  • Are comfortable with large data sets, and can draw correlations and insights about how our users behave
  • Have a basic understanding of modern web technologies to allow you to converse easily with engineers
  • Are technically curious. You should have a track record of reading about the latest technologies, and experimenting where possible
  • Have an appreciation for good design. You don’t need to be a designer, but you should share our aesthetic and know great design when you see it
  • Are disciplined and consistent in high quality execution

Talented Freelance Product Managers can work anywhere, so why choose us?

  • You’ll be inventing something completely new for the world that will help millions of people to feel happier and more confident about themselves
  • Opportunity to become recognised as one of the leaders in your field through playing a key role in the future growth of a high-profile startup
  • Learn from some of the best product people in the industry by working directly with our exceptional team: Kieran O’Neill (CEO) has built two products that scaled to millions of users; Ed Snelson (Head of Data Science) worked on some of the hardest machine learning challenges at Bing; Tom May (Product Manager) led growth at Songkick; Alexandra Allcott (Head of Brand) helped build some of the world’s biggest brands at Wieden+Kennedy; Tim Grimsditch (CMO) helped grow Spotify to hundreds of millions of users; Terry Betts (Head of Business Development) ran the £500m menswear business at Selfridges and co-founded Mr. Porter; etc.
  • Be part of a values-led team that are working hard to create one of the highest quality cultures in the world. Learn more about what we’re trying to do in our culture deck. Informal, non-hierarchical, non-political, sociable work environment with lots of autonomy and independence
  • Gain first-hand experience of how to start, grow, market and raise funding for startups (perhaps useful for your own company one day)
  • Free lunch together as a team four times a week, drinks and snacks together as a company on Fridays, monthly company trips to fun things like comedy shows, choose your own work equipment, no set working hours
  • A competitive day rate