We’re Wonderbly, the Children’s Publisher of the Year. Our world-renowned, creatively admired company writes, illustrates, designs and markets the world’s finest personalised books, to countries all over the world – and we have so far delighted over 6 million children with our marvellous stories.
We’re looking for an experienced, inspiring Senior Product Manager to join our small but mighty technology organisation at Wonderbly to help us take our personalisation experiences to the next level.
This is a unique individual contributor role that sits at the very heart of our growth strategy to create the world’s most successful and impactful personalised books for a very diverse group of global consumers.
You’ll be working closely with many parts of the organisation to manage and build out our connected suite of internal design tools and customer facing personalisation experiences. Your primary stakeholders will be from our Story Studio, the team that creates our unique personalised content.
Initially you’ll be helping to ship our core roadmap of personalised books and improving our internal design tools. Over the longer term you will work together with our publishing leadership team and our technology leaders to develop a range of innovative new personalisation experiences to drive significant growth for the company.
This position would suit someone who has several years experience building complex user experiences, ideally within a creative environment. Perhaps you’ve built tools for creators before at a company that makes SaaS tools or maybe you’ve worked on other personalisation like experiences – for example photo book creation apps? We’d love to get applications from design-led product managers for this position as there is a lot of UI invention to do. However, please bear in mind that you will be accountable for performance of your UI so you need to be very numerate and confident in measuring the impact of your work.
This role will require a flexible, imaginative and disciplined approach to product leadership. You’ll be working across a very unique set of applications and work types which makes prioritisation hard. For example, you will have to balance investments in background tooling and pipeline management projects against opportunities for fundamental UI metaphor change … and the inevitable quick wins.
This will require a creative approach to measuring progress along with the ability to effectively compartmentalise and work on multiple projects of different fidelities in parallel.
Because of the sophistication of the challenge, to make the most of this role you will need to be passionate and excited about our mission and category. We don’t have the answers as to what needs to be built. We therefore want to find someone that can remain deeply curious over the long term about the best ways to bridge the physical and digital worlds and enable users to create the most memorable, most impactful books imaginable.
Beyond the intellectual and creative challenge of building our personalisation stack we also offer a range of softer benefits that we believe make Wonderbly a great place to work as a Product Manager.
- Clear, Senior IC role. This is an individual contributor role. You will be responsible for setting strategy, managing roadmaps, prioritising features, unblocking delivery and getting results … but not managing people. There will be opportunities for mentoring and coaching but your primary responsibility is to the product and the performance of our customer experience.
- Sustainable business. We’ve been through our crazy hyper growth hyper intense VC teenage years. We now run the company as a sustainable, independent business that is not reliant on external capital. We believe this provides many advantages to our employees, chiefly a rational and manageable growth strategy linked to a rational and manageable workload. We live, and ship, within our means, and we mean this company to keep living for many many years to come.
- Multidisciplinary company. Although we’re small (75 people at present) we’re extremely multidisciplinary. We have writers, illustrators, engineers, print on demand manufacturing specialists, marketeers and many other roles in one place. And we all have to work together to make the Wonderbly machine work. We think this is a great place for curious folks.
- Flexible hybrid working. Because we believe in the value of multidisciplinary collaboration we have a simple hybrid policy. We ask colleagues to work from our beautiful London studio at least two days per week in order to build relationships and connect with folks beyond their immediate projects. We also offer an additional five weeks per year fully remote to enable folks to experiment with alternative ways of working. Finally, if you would like to work a four day week in this role we are happy to consider this.
- Generous compensation and benefits. We don’t offer FAANG salaries. But we do pay well and reward strong performance. This role offers a base salary of between £80k and £95k dependent on experience and it will come with participation in our performance bonus scheme. We also offer 28 days holiday, private health insurance for you and your family, training and development budgets and many other practical perks.
We hope the mission, the work and the context we’ve outlined here excites you. If it does, we’d love to hear from you.
Requirements
Below we’ve outlined some of the things we think a Senior Product Manager should be able to demonstrate to us in an interview. Please note that this is not an exclusive or exhaustive list. We strongly encourage you to apply if you believe you have similar but maybe adjacent skills and experience, are excited about the Wonderbly brand and products and the idea of building the world’s greatest personalisation experiences we’d love to hear from you.
- Flexible and original thinker, capable of managing several projects at different degrees of resolution in parallel and able to communicate these initiatives clearly and succinctly at different levels of the organisation.
- Hands on approach to shipping – this is a strategic role but we need someone that also loves to roll their sleeves up. We expect you to be able to sketch wireframes, conduct core user research, write user stories, QA features at a high level and conduct analysis across your core applications.
- Hands on experience building original software – it’s vital you’ve worked directly with engineers, designers and analysts to build and ship software. Working with agencies or managing 3rd party platforms via SaaS is not sufficient – we need a Product Manager that can ship.
- Demonstrable experience collaborating with other specialists, ideally beyond the traditional realms of software engineering – for example manufacturing, product development, marketing, creative departments
- Strong understanding of business dynamics at different lifecycle stages – this is more of a nice to have, but we’d love it if you’ve experienced working in a startup and a more mature organisation. We’re currently in a transition phase ourselves and having team members with a well of experience will be a big plus.
- Passion for the Wonderbly mission and category – this is a must have and the most important criteria! You need to be personally very excited about contributing to our mission to increase the stock of human happiness and connection in the world by introducing our beautiful high quality personalised books to everyone with a bookshelf.
How to apply and what to expect
If you are interested in this role please apply directly using the workable link. Please include an up to date CV and a cover letter outlining why you believe you would be a good fit for this role. Please include at least one paragraph on your interest in our mission and category in this letter.
We will begin reviewing applications from the first week of January. Once we have received your application we will contact you within a week. If we wish to move forward this will include some options for a short phone call with a member of our recruitment team who can answer practical questions around compensation and big picture questions around the company and the role.
If we both choose to move forward after this, the interview process will consist of two interview stages and a maximum of three interviews. During these interviews you will meet with members of the Wonderbly technology organisation including cross functional peers and managers.
If there are any specific individuals you would like to meet with this can be arranged. Ideally one of these interviews will happen in person at the Wonderbly studios in London, although this is not required.
Benefits
First and foremost you should join Wonderbly because of the work. We’re on a mission to inspire boundless self belief in every child, everywhere through our beautiful personalised books.
- The chance to work on something your friends and family will fall in love with
- We have a flexible, hybrid working model that you can tailor to suit what works best for you. Depending on Covid restrictions, we’re asking our staff to come into our lovely light filled Central London studio at least two days a week and then to choose what works best for them for the rest of the time
- Cycle to work scheme
- Regular Yoga classes and mental health support
- Personal training allowance
- 28 days holiday, plus 8 bank holidays
- Health insurance to keep you in tip-top shape
- Pension scheme
- We love having dogs in the office (well behaved ones anyway)!
Equal opportunities employer
Our team are committed to providing equal opportunities for employment regardless of of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, disability, family structure, socio-economic status, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other basis (it’s the law, but it’s also just the right thing to do).