About Secret Escapes
Secret Escapes is the UK’s biggest members-only website that runs best-in-market flash sales of four and five star hotels and holidays worldwide. We offer our members exclusive rates of up to 60% off. We already have more than 31 million members worldwide and a social-media following the size of a small country, and you can now find us everywhere from Spain to the US, from Sweden to Italy, Poland and Norway, from Germany to Switzerland, and elsewhere too. In short, we’re doing big things fast and it’s all very exciting.
We’re looking for a Product Director to lead, motivate and coach the entire product team, as well as moving our Product team from an efficient service function to the true owners of the customer experience on our marketplace.
The Secret Escapes product team has historically focussed on ensuring that our roadmap is full of the right projects to improve our core model of flash hotel sales as efficiently as possible – and we think we’re pretty good at that. However, we want to add best in class expertise around customer focussed innovation to the team. We’re in the exciting position that we have a core model the drives profitably growth and we’re resourced to challenge ourselves around whether we need bolder innovation in order to more quickly achieve our vision of Inspiring the World to Escape.
This is an exciting opportunity for someone looking for a high impact product role in a fast-paced environment, with a real opportunity to take a good team and make it world class.
Overall Job Purpose
You’ll be a key partner to the wider business to ensure both core-model and R&D projects are delivered collaboratively to a common goal and vision.
You’ll manage a large and complex backlog across multiple work streams, which will consist of both new features and technical debt, so you’ll often need to make tough trade-offs between them.
Problems we are trying to solve
- How do we break down our complex consumer & supplier problems into projects that will Inspire more People to Escape?
- How do we drive product development at a fast pace?
- How do we ensure collaboration across the business to ensure projects are delivered timely with our vision at the foremost?
- How do we balance the desire to optimise our core model with the risk that we’re missing focussing on local optimisation?
- How do we maintain a discipline around hypothesis led thinking and MVP testing while evolving from a start-up to scale-up?
- How do we move from a projects focussed team to a team that owns and iterates on the keys flows of the marketplace?
Things you’ll be working on
- Working closely with our co-founders and senior management team to identify market opportunities and help drive product vision and strategy, aligning the rest of the organisation to deliver growth targets.
- Partnering with our CTO and wider business, you will create and take ownership of the product roadmap, engaging key stakeholders to communicate a coherent product strategy.
- Build business cases and confidently present these to peer managers and the board to gain approval.
- Be accountable for delivery across all road maps
- Full line management of the product team to include regular one-to-ones, career development conversations and performance management
- You will set clear and ambitious (goals around delivery and quality) for the team as well as set them up for success with the right training, tools and support
- Be an advocate for using business and product data for product improvement and enhancement
- Driving passion, quality, best practice, and energy across the team
- Generating excitement across the business through your product vision, influencing stakeholders and winning buy in
- Act as a voice of the customer for the business
The deal breakers. We are looking for.
- Strong digital product management experience in a fast-paced ecommerce environment
- Expert stakeholder management and cross functional communication skills
- Able to manage complex R&D initiatives and turn them into viable business streams
- Experience executing product strategy across multiple teams, features, and conflicting priorities
- Experience leading, mentoring and motivating a Product team
- Education: honours degree or MBA in a numerical discipline
- Experience in running qualitative market research and AB testing programs
- Excellent data analytics experience, turning insights into actionable recommendations. You’ll have no problem being challenged, and challenging others respectively
- A clear ability to describe how you’ve scaled a product and its overall function, how you did it, why you made those choices and what you delivered
- Experience in travel and/or flash sales is ideal, but not mandatory
- Experience of taking a Product team from start-up to scale-up is ideal, but not mandatory
And you are someone who…
- You’re a keen prioritiser and super organised
- Enjoys building teams and people development
- An excellent communicator
- A natural problem solver
- Has gravitas, style and a presence that makes a positive impression
- Enthusiastic, results driven and commercially aware
- Thrives in a culture where change is normal
- Is persistent and never accepts falling at the first hurdle
- Is open-minded enough to listen to and be influenced by sound arguments and new information or evidence
- Sets an inspiring example through personal delivery, energy and determination