We’re looking for a Product Manager to lead our Host Product team and be a key part in building a business that brings technical excellence together with incredible visual creatives and brand builders; you will be an early team member of what we believe will be one of the most famous startups of the next 10 years.
This is an unparalleled opportunity to be part of a passionate, friendly and transparent culture that empowers you to make decisions that will have a direct impact on improving the business and give you ultimate responsibility when scaling at pace; you will be part of discussions on tech, fundraising, product, brand and global expansion.
About us
The Plum Guide is on a mission is to build the definitive collection of the world’s best holiday homes.
We are taking a systematic approach to testing every single home on the planet and accepting only the top very best. Like a Michelin Guide – but for homes.
We do it by putting every home in a city through the Plum test – a gruelling hospitality exam, which uses a mix of top-down algorithms and physical visits by hospitality experts.
We launched three years ago. Since then we have grown 20% month-on-month, expanded to twelve cities, tested over 150,000 homes, and developed a customer experience that’s returning the highest NPS scores in the sector. We are backed by some of the world’s top entrepreneurs and VCs. These include the founders and backers of TransferWise, Citymapper, Zoopla, Secret Escapes, BuzzFeed, AppearHere, Graze, LoveFilm, and many more.
The Role
You will be the product owner of our Host team, working closely with stakeholders from our marketplace team and across the wider business. In particular you will lead the product development in the following key areas:
- Host experience: concepting and productising the host experience, everything from on-boarding and communications to dashboards and pricing.
- Home acquisition: make it easier to find and integrate amazing homes into the collection quickly, owning our host API which provides calendar and price synchronisation solutions that suit both big global partners and individual hosts via channel manager integration.
- Testing criteria: owning and building on the secret sauce of The Plum Guide – our internal testing algorithm and platform with 250 questions and 350 data points about every single home in our collection. You help decide who’s in or out!
What you’ll get up to:
- Devising the platform’s operational vision and strategy: shaping what features, services and improvements we launch.
- Leading your team to concept world class builds including:Working with hosts and internal teams to really understand pain points and needs.
- Converting this understanding into concepts: user stories, visual mock-ups etc.
- Running sprints and prioritisation meetings with stakeholders.
- Testing and iterating the concept with hosts, staff and experts.
- Getting into the nitty gritty details of complex, analytical, and technical projects.
- Leading the engineering team to build and ship these products on time, on budget and to an extremely high standard.
- Running an always-on program of iteration, testing and improvement.
- Coordinating, managing and upskilling a world class squad of engineers.
Who we are looking for
This role does require a very diverse set of skills. As such, we will prioritise hiring people with the right raw talent and attitude, over particular skills. The important thing is that you:
Find the idea of building one of the world’s most iconic digital products insanely motivating and have a super strong vision for what makes a great digital product.
- Are obsessed with understanding details, and are highly attuned to noticing pain points, needs, niggles and frustrations. You roll up your sleeves and get into the detail.
- A “conceptor” at heart: you find it easy to convert your insights into simple, intuitive and emotionally resonant concepts, interfaces and user journeys.
- Have proven experience in online product management including:Prototyping, spec writing, wireframing and test design.
- Overseeing and directing UX, analytics, design, research and technical talent.
- Iterating and improving product development processes.
You believe no project is too complex and relish the delivery of them – and have examples of past products and features that you delivered from scratch. - You care about being agile and shipping for impact.
- You thrive in a fast-paced start-up environment and are comfortable dealing with ambiguity, risk management and changing requirements.
- Effective written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present to senior stakeholders.
- Experience prioritising projects based on impact and business goals and managing stakeholders accordingly.
- Experience leading technical teams to organise, prioritise and track tasks in a detailed manner. Experience of Scrum is a bonus.
- Entrepreneurial, self-starter who recognises where processes can be improved and initiates to improve them.
- Experience in internationalisation and localisation is a bonus.
- You are exceptionally organised, and scarily ambitious, with an unreasonably high standard for what is good enough.
- Able to direct, inspire and drive collaboration between a diverse set of individuals: engineers, designers, researchers and project managers.
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Generous option scheme; Suffice to say, our ambition is that everyone does extremely well out of Plum. Hopefully, the fact that we are backed by top tier investors gives you the confidence that we are not alone in believing Plum will make it big.
- 25 days annual leave
- Pension scheme
- Cycle to work scheme
- Discounted gym membership