THE CARWOW GROUP
Carwow Group is driven by a passion for getting people into cars. But not just any car, the right car. That’s why we are building the go-to destination for car-changing. Designed to reach drivers everywhere with our trail-blazing portfolio of personality rich automotive brands; Carwow, Auto Express, evo, Driving Electric and Car Buyer.
What started as a simple reviews site, is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe - over 10m customers have used Carwow to help them buy and sell cars since its inception. Last year we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service.
In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia, doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with over 1.1 billion annual views, sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million.
WHY JOIN US?
We are winners of the prestigious Culture 100 award that recognises the most loved and happiest tech companies to work for! We have just raised $52m in funding led by global venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners (an early backer of LinkedIn and Shopify) to accelerate our growth plans!
As pioneers, we’re always driving for new territory and positive change, so our work as a group is never done. Where others see difficulty, it’s our responsibility to see possibility – building new experiences, launching new titles and listening to drivers.
Being a part of Carwow Group means championing drivers and the automotive industry, acting as a disrupter and never being afraid to fail (but learning fast when we do!).
Our team of 600 employees across the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal are revolutionising car-changing and we are fast expanding our mission across every single brand and country we operate in, so jump in!
THE ROLE
Are you ready to be at the forefront of changing how drivers sell their cars? Only 10% of cars are currently sold through platforms like ours even though our data shows that owners who sell this way achieve £1000 on average more for their vehicle.
We’re looking for a VP of Product to join our team and help us build a game changing experience for sellers and buyers. We need someone dynamic and visionary who will lead the next stage in growth, driving differentiation and excellence in everything we do.
As a VP of Product responsible for our Sell My Car, you will own our proposition - the very core of what we do - our offer to sellers and buyers across every aspect of our service.
Carwow only launched this new service in the UK in 2021 - for the first time customers looking to change their cars could list their existing cars on our site and dealers would bid for them ensuring they got the best possible price for their vehicles. Since then we have driven phenomenal year-on-year growth (+83% in FY2023) while also improving profitability. Sell My Car is now our biggest revenue line globally even though we are still only operating it in the UK.
Selling your car online in this way, or buying stock directly from drivers in this way, is still a relatively new ‘thing’. We’re building our understanding daily of what will work for sellers and buyers and we’re adapting together, making changes to how we operate as our buyers also adapt their business models. It’s worth being clear that unlike other product roles, this is a proposition role, it encompasses everything we put into market a service or product ensuring that these form a cohesive experience both for buyers and sellers. This provides the flexibility to solve problems in different ways: through onsite user journeys, through call centres or operational services or through the introduction of third party services or tools.
Operating in this type of environment requires an appetite for complex problem solving where there are often no apparent solutions, a high degree of creativity, courage to test and learn and the willingness to change direction and adapt in the face of new information. It requires ruthless prioritisation, rapid decision making and the confidence to move quickly with imperfect data. This is not a role of incremental gains and improvements, it’s an incredible opportunity to put your own stamp on a service and the product experiences it is delivered through - something most people don’t get to do in their whole careers.
You’ll develop our Carwow and White Label value propositions in the UK and for our European markets working with teams across Sell My Car (commercial, sales, trading, operations) and across the wider business (marketing, B2B marketing, analytics and Get Your Car) to that, and bringing it to life in a way that allows them to work towards the common goal of a seamless car selling and buying experience.
Leading a growing team of product managers and designers you’ll directly oversee the work of multiple product teams (PMs, analysts, engineers, designers), supporting planning that aligns to business goals and deliver high return on that investment. Over the next few years, you will actively expand these teams, identifying areas of high ROI across our proposition and working with trading directors to create the case for investment.
A key part of your role is telling the Sell My Car story across the wider organisation generating high awareness across the C-team of the key opportunities and how you are pursuing them.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Vision, value proposition & strategy: Create collaboratively with the executive and senior leadership across the SMC and wider Carwow organisation an exciting product vision, value proposition and strategy for the Sell My Car vertical that delivers strategic differentiation vs competitors
- Roadmap & planning: Develop and consistently maintain a clearly articulated and compelling roadmap that shows sequencing towards the vision and can be used for internal planning across teams, and communicated to buying partners to drive engagement and adoption. Work with all areas of the Sell My Car to detail and develop this roadmap
- Prioritisation & ROI:Align teams around the commercial impact of the outcome they are working towards and ensure that we are prioritising effectively between strategic progress and near term trading priorities. Actively measure and report on ROI of product investments constantly improving our ability to do this.
- Proposition development: Oversee the development and decision making process for key initiatives that drive our proposition forward, focusing on getting decisions made across senior leadership teams, working to execute across multiple teams and facilitating co-ordinated GTM that also tracks overall impact.
- Set up team for success: Create an environment that allows the team to get the best out of all the people in their squad by helping provide wider context, giving clarity on goals, supporting and setting processes for the team to collaborate effectively. Make strong and diverse hires to ensure the team are well set up for differentiated and innovative product thinking. Plan ahead restructuring teams and their accountabilities in line with business plan.
- Fluent with data: Use data to generate actionable insights, to leverage those insights to achieve goals set for the product, and to connect those quantified goals to meaningful outcomes for the business.
- Design obsession: demonstrate a deep passion for exceptional experience design that goes beyond what is on a web page and delivers market leading customer journeys across every touch point for our customers.
- Problem definition and structured thinking:
- Synthesises insights from various sources to craft a clear problems statement articulating the root cause problem in an structured way and demonstrates clarity when aligning the team to the problem.
- Identify and use a range of confidence building methods to learn as fast as possible and ensure we build the right thing.
- Communication:Ensures all people involved and the wider commercial team are aware of the vision, team strategy, initiatives, priorities and progress.
- Core architecture for scale and lead on organisational structure: Oversee the development of our white label tools and international solutions. Understand and articulate the technical architecture for long term maintenance and ongoing development, set teams up with clear accountability to operate SaaS ensuring decisions taken through development and roll out support this.
- Influence: Build relationships easily to empower the squad to achieve the desired outcome often by influencing the opinions of others often outside of your team.
- Stakeholder management: Work across a wide range of stakeholders to get the right input, their ideas and ensure that they have the right information to represent the product team into their areas/functions.
- Voice of the customer: Build empathy with our customers (sellers and buyers) and leverage feedback in the form of interviews, conversations, usability tests, surveys, and other forms of research to understand how users and enterprise partners engage with the product, make better decisions, and drive meaningful outcomes for the business.
- Drive continuous improvement monitoring the performance of your own and the engineering teams, identifying ways to improve the quality and pace of decision making and output ensuring we get more from our investments.
- Market Leading: Stay abreast of emerging trends, technologies, and best practices in operations management, financial management, and P&L optimization, and assess their potential impact on the business
WHAT YOU'LL NEED
- You are a visionary strategic thinker, being able to think both top down and bottom up
- You thrive in environments of change, when complexity is high and the problems to solve are hard. You have an ability to take it all in, articulate and structure a vision and a clear way forward
- You have a growth mindset, constantly looking for ways to go faster, do more and inspire your teams in this way.
- You have an empathetic leadership style and you build strong, effective relationships. Ability to motivate, nurture and develop your teams
- Have an outstanding ability to think on your feet and tackle intellectually challenging problems
- Be highly analytical and accustomed to using complex data to make decisions - when you’re presented with data, analysis should be a reflex
- Be forward-thinking and ambitious
- 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
- Be a great prioritiser, not afraid to say no
- Data informs but doesn’t drive your decision making: you know when to use it and when to lean on instinct to move quickly
- Love working autonomously, but you’re able to earn the trust of others with a collaborative style
- Excel at managing stakeholders, whilst also being confident in voicing your own opinions and challenging others
- You have proven ability to quickly get up to speed in a domain and identify trends and opportunities.
- Track record of constant team efficiency improvements
- Clear development of winning strategies and successful execution
WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU
- Hybrid working
- Competitive salary to fund that dream holiday to Bali
- Matched pension contributions for a peaceful retirement
- Share options - when we thrive, so do you!
- Vitality Private Healthcare, for peace of mind, plus eyecare vouchers
- Life Assurance for (even more) peace of mind
- Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner
- Enhanced holiday package, plus Bank Holidays
- 28 days annual leave
- 1 day for your wedding
- 1 day off when you move house - because moving is hard enough without work!
- For your third year anniversary, get 30 days of annual leave per year
- For your tenth year anniversary, get 35 days of annual leave per year
- Option to buy 3 extra days of holiday per year
- Work from abroad for a month
- Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies
- Bubble childcare support and discounted nanny fees for little ones
- The latest tech (Macbook or Surface) to power your gif-sending talents
- Up to £500/€550 home office allowance for that massage chair you’ve been talking about
- Generous learning and development budget to help you master your craft
- Regular social events: tech lunches, coffee with the exec sessions, lunch & learns, book clubs, social events/anything else you pester us for
- Refer a friend, get paid. Repeat for infinite money
Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.
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