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 retail customer experience to the next level.
You’ll be working with our commercial stakeholders, designers, analysts and engineers to discover and ship bold new features that delight the increasingly diverse global customer base visiting our personalised book shop at wonderbly.com
This is a vital individual contributor position that will play a central role in our long term growth strategy to build a personalized book shop that serves customers shopping for every age, occasion and taste. We’re hoping to find someone for this role that is as excited about this challenge as we are.
This position would suit someone who has several years experience building more traditional ecommerce experiences for other consumer brands and now wants to use that knowledge to work on a harder and, perhaps, more meaningful challenge.
Whilst much of what we do follows best practices there’s also many elements that make our proposition very unique and thus requires fresh thinking across the key product management domains of business, design and technology. A few examples include:
- Personalisation. All of our products require customers to interact with our sophisticated personalisation user experiences. This provides many exciting opportunities for innovation and creativity … but also many challenges as we must manage the whole customer journey on our proprietary software platform.
- Proprietary products. We only sell products that we design ourselves with our in-house Story Studio team. Again, this creates huge opportunities for collaboration and original ideas … but also challenges around coordination and prioritisation.
- Imaginative products. The products we sell and the consumer needs we fulfill are imaginative and creative. We don’t compete on price and feature grids! This means we have to work hard with our marketing colleagues to bring to life the rich value of our books to consumers.
- Highly internationalised operations. For our small size we are highly international. We currently support 40 locales, 12 languages, manufacture on four continents and ship to every country in the world. Again, this creates opportunities but also complex coordination and optimisation challenges.
If these sound like the sort of challenges you’d love to get stuck into, we’d love to hear from you.
Beyond the intellectual and creative challenge of building our retail product 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 for 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 personalised book shop.
- 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.
- Track record of achieving commercial results in a growth oriented organisation – ideally we’d like to hear about your strategic wins as well as features you’ve shipped and their impact during an interview
- Demonstrable experience collaborating with other specialists, ideally beyond the traditional realms of software engineering – for example manufacturing, product development, marketing, creative departments
- Direct to customer ecommerce brand or category experience – we expect you to be familiar with the core metrics and tradeoffs within the ecommerce industry
- 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 ecommerce platforms via SaaS is not sufficient – we need a Product Manager that can ship.
- 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. On 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).