Travel technology is in our blood
Holiday Extras is a fast moving technology business where our purpose is to make travel better. We make it easy for customers to make the most of their trip. With over 4 million bookings a year we are one of the UK’s most innovative travel companies and continue to grow fast and expand our offering.
We’re the UK market leader in travel ancillaries; once you have booked a flight and accommodation, we take care of the rest. That includes airport hotels, insurance, airport parking, lounges, foreign currency, car hire, resort transfers and attractions. Almost all of our business is conducted online, either direct through our own website and apps or through our network of partners that include the major travel retailers, airlines and tour operators.
Our product engineering team is based near the beach in Hythe, Kent, less than an hour from London and we also have engineers in Sofia (Bulgaria). In total we have more than 130 people working on our product development including engineers, product managers, testers, and designers. The team form into pods, each pod having a mission and part of the customer journey that they focus on, with clear KPIs that they work on improving.
How you can make a difference
As Product Manager, first and foremost you will understand our customers; their needs, wants, behaviours and attitudes. You will constantly gather information from as many sources as you can, both structured and unstructured, qualitative and quantitative to support your decision making and strategy. You know your data and you also understand how and why our customers think and act.
In conjunction with the Associate Director of Product and in coordination with other Product Managers in the group, you will translate the company strategy into product initiatives that will help us achieve our objectives.
You will have responsibility for a core part of our customer experience and product offering, developing plans to improve the experience to create a “wow” effect. Working closely with UI designers, you will decide on what improvements or changes to launch, test or retire. You will form hypotheses on what success will look like and ensure you have the measurements in place to know the impact of tests.
Your aim will be to deliver value quickly, both to our customers and to the company, working in short iterative cycles to build measure and learn. Changes are delivered incrementally and often, always being able to explain the “why” behind the test and being on top of the results.
You will need to be ruthless in prioritising tests that could deliver real value, staying true to the company strategy. You will be flexible in your approach, being willing to change and adapt plans quickly based on new information. Your cognitive biases are left at the door, and you’re not afraid to fail.
You will have a deep intuitive sense of what good likes like for consumer internet products. You’ll never be satisfied with a pixel out of position but you will first prioritise learning and only insist on perfection once a change has proven it’s value.
This is a new high profile role within the company with direct access to the Group CEO and working right at the heart of our mission and you’ll be in a position to make a huge improvement to the holidays of millions of travellers.
We’re an ambitious company, 34 years young with huge growth plans. Join us on our journey for the career trip of a lifetime.
Pre-departure checklist
Self-starter: a driven, motivated individual who identifies opportunities and is prepared to get their hands dirty (digging into the details, helping push things over the line)
Deep experience in consumer internet product development for a fast moving transactional business, both on desktop and mobile apps
A strong eye for design and a hands on ability to wireframe concepts quickly using tools such as Balsamiq or Gomockingbird
Confident and capable in data analytics, able to learn how to self-serve quickly using data analysis tools and make sense of A/B and multivariate test scenarios. Able to interpret the data to inform product direction
Natural customer empathy and curiosity with an insatiable desire to improve the customer experience
An inspirational and effective communicator, both written and verbal, able to influence and coordinate internal stakeholders with evidence based recommendations
Outcome-driven, able to tell us how you moved the dial on KPIs for products you’ve worked on
An eye for detail and tenacity to build best in class products
You can ‘speak’ tech, design, data and business and love keeping yourself up to date with the latest trends, frameworks, tools and methodologies
You’re a natural born leader, people want to work with you – you are someone who loves to get stuff done but has fun along the way
You bounce back after failure and have an appetite for delivering and learning fast
Join us on this journey
We’re unlike any other company you’ve worked for. Located at our Newingreen campus in Kent, we can almost breathe in the sea air. We think different. You’ll feel our energy and enthusiasm from day one. We have a very special culture based on our 5 core values; Be One Team, Be Pioneering In Spirit, Be At The Helm, Be Courageous and Be The Best Version of You. Matthew, our Group CEO, has a 95% approval rating on Glassdoor, team members rate us at 4.5/5 overall as a place to work. We’re in the Sunday Times top 100 place to work have been so for the last 10 years straight.
We offer a huge range of benefits as well as a competitive salary.