Lead Product Manager

As a member of one of our Operations product teams, you will be central to building and growing your product area and outcomes by leading a team through discovery – establishing what the right thing to build is – to implementation and beyond.

As a Lead Product Manager you will own one or more products and be responsible for leading the full life-cycle of them, owning the vision, supporting strategy and communicating a roadmap within an existing team. You will also be responsible for line managing and coaching other Product Managers in the Operations domain. You’ll take your product from ideation and discovery through design, delivery, preparation for launch, measuring of success, and iterations.

Working closely with engineering, you are ultimately responsible for making sure we’re building the right things for users of your products. Your partners in engineering are responsible for making sure we build these things in the right way, but both of you care deeply about both things - it’s one team!

At Cazoo we believe in autonomous empowered Product Teams. While there will be plenty of strong opinions across our business about what the right thing to build is, you and your team are responsible for rapidly evaluating these ideas using experimentation and data to determine what is the right thing to build for our customers and business. 

Cazoo is the UK’s fastest unicorn - our aim is to transform the way people purchase used cars and you will play a critical role in supporting that mission. 

About Operations

Operations is critical function at Cazoo. In any online to offline business, there is operations complexity but at Cazoo this is far greater due to the nature of our product!

Operations is currently made up of Distribution, Fulfilment and Transport systems. It’s an incredibly exciting area that forms the backbone of Cazoo’s growth, profitability and market differentiation. We use a mixture of 3rd party and in-house bespoke software to help scale Cazoo’s operations. Your product portfolio will be diverse as we look to develop world class internal facing tools and customer facing products that intersect between Cazoo’s operations and world class customer proposition. 

Finding and managing opportunities

You will...

• Work with your customers, team and stakeholders to identify problems to solve or opportunities for growth
• Set quarterly OKRs and own the Product strategy for your domain
• Rapidly build knowledge of your domain and assess opportunities
• Be inspired by new technology, competitors/like-minded businesses, future thinking, and more to suggest opportunities to improve Cazoo
• Take responsibility for forming hypotheses and measures, and ensuring there is a backlog of epics with agreed priority
• Proactively engage with stakeholders to define the strategy and direction for your Products.
• Work closely with stakeholders to set strategy and vision for your domain
• Define KPIs to measure the success of your product
• Manage relationships with any 3rd parties related to your product

Product Discovery

You will...

• Lead stakeholder sessions to determine key customer outcomes
• Lead product discovery, collaborating with UX, User Research, Engineering and key business SMEs
• Determine what the right thing to build is for your customers – supported by data and evidence – as quickly and cheaply as possible
• Work with the various cross-functional teams to understand the needs of your users
• Champion solutions that work for our customers and the business
• Define use cases and user journeys
• Collaborate on Service Design
• Define risks and look to build confidence for your teams around the largest gaps and risks that may surface during Discovery

Delivery

You will...

• Work in close partnership with your team’s Engineering Manager to ensure Product Delivery is on track
• Lead the product design and builds to ensure we deliver in an efficient, cost effective manner
• Prioritise and set the team direction, creating a sense of urgency and momentum
• Write user stories and acceptance criteria
• Manage features through development, ensuring stakeholders are kept up to date
• Break down your deliverables into smaller value chunks and iterate through delivery, releasing value early and often
• Work closely with your Engineering Manager to plan sprints, releases and coordinate across dependent products
• Coordinate with key stakeholders to launch features
• Monitor and measure the success of the feature/product
• Lead decision on persist, iterate, or drop

Line Management

You will...

• Line manage 1 or 2 Product Managers at Cazoo
• Help coach and grow Product Managers by identifying personal development needs and supporting Product Managers in their career growth
• Support your Product Managers with Product strategy and senior trade off discussions

Product Management Practice

You will...

• Proactively keep up to date with latest developments in product management thinking, process and techniques
• Champion Build Measure Learn, creating a culture of innovation and continuous improvement within the product management discipline, especially in discovery and delivery methodologies
• Focus on Outcomes instead of Outputs and ensure we’re enabling positive outcomes for the business

We are looking for a Product Manager...

• with proven experience in working out what the right things to build are (as opposed to being told what to build by someone else!)
• dual track (discovery/delivery) experience; at Cazoo we’re big fans of Marty Cagan
• with experience developing complex products through full life cycle
• who has worked with development teams to deliver amazing products with clearly measurable customer and business benefits
• with experience in managing API integrations and/or event based architecture
• with great stakeholder management and facilitation skills
• with an excellent sense of empathy for end-users
• who is comfortable with embracing ambiguity 
• with the ability to compromise in the right way
• with a passion for product design and the experience to back up their views
• with demonstrable ability to rapidly gain in-depth knowledge of your product’s domain
• who loves collaboration and has experience in leading varied groups to swift decisions
• With a passion bringing different people and teams together to build something wonderful
• Experience in line management at some point in their careers