Product Director

Job Description

Carwow is looking for a Product Director to join our Product organisation in London.

About carwow

Buying or selling a car shouldn’t be difficult! That’s why here at carwow we are on a mission to change the way people buy, sell or use a car by creating the world’s best online car marketplace. We're not all petrolheads - just a highly driven (excuse the pun) scale-up with over 350 carwowers in the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal .

Since starting our journey in 2011, we’ve grown to become one of the most trusted comparison sites with over 12 million users and a Trustpilot rating of 4.7. We are also very proud to be backed by some of Europe’s most respected technology, marketplace and automotive investors.

Working here

At carwow, we aim to create a culture where our team can thrive no matter where or how they work. With hybrid working (1-2 days in the office although more if you like), and a healthy home office budget of £500, we are also open to looking at alternative working patterns to ensure carwowers can work in a way that works best for them.

We’re a curious bunch and benefit from a number of different training opportunities. We are big on celebrating successes, working collaboratively and have found lots of ways to stay connected as a team both virtually and in person.

With a team of over 25 different nationalities, we know a diverse and inclusive workforce creates a more innovative company. We have work to do to get us where we’d like to be, but are working hard to get there and have a number of key DE&I initiatives underway.

So, if you always aim to WOW through everything you do (check out more info about our values here), we’d love you to join us on our journey.

About carwow’s Product Organization

carwow is scaling rapidly. Our product organization currently includes 9 product squads and we are looking to expand to 14 in 2022. This growth will allow the expansion into different products and adjacent markets, which is one of our key strategic pillars for the next 2-3 years. In this context, we are moving our organization towards a “Tribes and Squads” structure and we are looking for a product leader to lead one of our Tribes from a product management perspective. For more information about our Product Organization, please visit our medium blog (here)

About the role

As a Product Director | Buy Your car (BYC) you will lead one of our tribes focusing on our Buy Your Car proposition, including new cars, used cars and Leasing. You will be working very closely with our product leadership (CTO, CPO, Head of Design, Head of Product Analytics) and very talented product managers within your tribe to define and execute the product strategy while coaching and developing our team of product managers.

About the key responsibilities

• Strategy: Create, together with our CPO and the product managers, an exciting product vision and strategy for the Buy Your car vertical, leading the transition towards E2E online experiences with increasingly sophisticated partners
• Impact driven: Work with product managers to define and track the right OKRs that provide focus on the right priorities for the teams to solve customer problems in a way that moves key business outcomes.
• Communication: Ensures all people involved are aware of the tribe strategy, initiatives, priorities and progress
• Stake-holder management: Build relationships and collaborate with senior stakeholders across the business (commercial leadership, growth marketing leadership, exec members) in a empathetic way to align objectives, get the right input and influence them to make things happen
• Coaching and development: Coach and develop product managers in your tribe in line with our product management career framework and be responsible for all aspects of their success, both in their current role and their longer-term career

Ways of working: Being a guardian and evangelizer of our Product Principles and Discovery and Deliver process, whilst challenging them to be better every day as a Product organization

Requirements

About you

• You are a strategic thinker, being able to think both top down and bottom up
• You’ve directly led successful consumer products from concept to adoption, with experience in all stages of the product life cycle and during rapid growth.
• You have an empathetic leadership style and you build strong, effective relationships.
• You’ve extensive experience managing Product Managers and are passionate about developing people and supporting them to be part of high-performing teams.
• You have an outstanding ability to think on your feet and tackle intellectually challenging problems
• You know when to employ different approaches to product management and can balance lean-style MVP experimental work with focused iteration.

• You understand the power and value of world-class design
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, whether to the tech team, to other stakeholders or to our leadership team. Effective in distilling complex solutions into bite-sized pieces when speaking and writing
• You have experienced creating a culture of discovery and properly understanding problems and opportunities, before jumping into solutions
• You're highly analytical and used to using data and qualitative insights to make decisions.
• You have proven ability to quickly get up to speed in a domain and identify trends and opportunities

Bonus points (not required):

• Experience in marketplaces or e-commerce
• Experience in business with entreprises partners or clientes (e.g. B2C marketplaces, Enterprises SaaS)

Benefits

• A competitive salary with equity in the company (share options)
• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and Christmas Eve or an alternative religious holiday of your choice*
• Life insurance (4 x basic salary)
• Private pension scheme (carwow will match contributions up to 5%)
• Private medical health insurance with Vitality
• Enhanced parental leave including 20 weeks full paid maternity and 8 weeks full paid paternity leave
• Free access to Sanctus mental-health coaching sessions
• The latest core Tech (Macbook Air or PC Surface Pro)
• Home Office budget of £500/€550
• Salary sacrifice benefits (i.e. cycle to work), Travel Loan
• Subsidised gym membership (50% off David Lloyds, Virgin Active and Nuffield Health)

*if you are not religious, this day will remain as Christmas Eve in conjunction with usual Christmas Bank Holidays

CSR

We are leading the change to Electric vehicles and are conscious of the impact our industry can have on the environment. We’ve already planted over 45,000 trees to date as a thank you to those who leave us a review and are extremely excited about our new partnership with ‘One Tree Planted’, which we hope will increase the number to around 60,000 trees a year.