Product Manager - Platform

About Perlego

Perlego is on a mission to make education accessible to everyone. Dubbed "The Spotify for Textbooks," we give learners worldwide unlimited access to over 1.5 million ebooks and educational resources from 9,000+ leading publishers, and we partner with hundreds of universities, businesses, and training providers to put a library in every learner's pocket. More recently we've expanded beyond the textbook into leisure reading, bringing best-selling fiction, non-fiction, professional and general-interest books onto the same subscription, so the person who came to us for their course reading now has somewhere to go when the term ends.

Students, professionals and curious readers in over 100 countries read on Perlego every day, across web, iOS and Android, and the experience they have once they're inside the product is what this role is about.

The Platform Experience (PEX) squad is the custodian of the Perlego user experience after a user has signed up. The squad aims to make every user’s experience a delight — whether that be finding their next book, organising their digital bookshelves or reading a book on the Perlego web or mobile eReader.

As the Product Manager in PEX you’ll be working on bets such as consolidating our book search and recommendations features, developing relevant and useful AI tools for students and overhauling our mobile eReader. You will own the discovery, shaping, proposal and delivery of bets in the Platform Experience squad end to end and you will connect the work to the numbers the squad is judged on.

Requirements

• 2+ years owning product. You have shipped things that changed a number, and you can say which number and by how much.
• Experience in building habit forming experiences and driving weekly and monthly engagement metrics.
• Genuinely quantitative. There is no dedicated Data Analyst attached to your squad, so you need to be comfortable with digging in to data and BI tools. You can read an experiment result, and you can size an opportunity yourself.
• You brief engineers and designers and the brief holds up under questioning. Scope, edge cases, and what is deliberately out and a clear rationale for why.
• You talk to users regularly, and you use what you hear to shape what you build rather than to validate it afterwards.
• You make trade-offs and say what you traded away. Ambiguity is the normal operating condition here, not a problem to be escalated.

This is not a backlog management role. Nobody will hand you a prioritised list. You build it, defend it, and own what happens.

• Analysing and synthesising quantitative and qualitative evidence, and communicating what it means
• Placing the impact of the work in company context: which squad KPI moves, roughly how much, and why that matters
• Briefing engineers, designers and copywriters, with light review
• Stakeholder engagement on your bets, seeking input and and supporting decisions with evidence
• Building understanding of users, the industry and the squad’s problem space
• Applying the agreed product tools and methods with limited support

Perlego is organised into cross-functional squads, each grouped under a layer of the business and each accountable for a small set of KPIs. Squads are made up of Product, Engineering, Design, QA and Data, and they own their problem space rather than a feature list.

We work in bets. A bet is a clearly stated hypothesis about how to move a squad KPI, with the evidence behind it, the scope, and what has deliberately been left out. Bets are proposed by the squad, reviewed in a company-wide roadmap cycle, and then delivered by the squad that proposed them. Most bets are sized to ship and read within a quarter.

Occasionally we commit to a bold bet, a…