Senior Product Manager - Search

Location:

Remote / Hybrid with monthly travel to our Sheffield HQ

The Senior Product Manager for Search & Recommendation will lead the strategy, discovery, and execution for the core product experiences that help our users find what they need and discover educational resources. This role is critical to the user experience and business growth, directly impacting conversion, engagement, and retention metrics. You will own the vision for our search algorithms, relevancy ranking, personalized recommendations, and overall information retrieval capabilities.

You will work closely with a dedicated team of engineers, data scientists, product designers, and user researchers to deliver world‑class, data‑driven solutions for educators.

• Define and champion the long‑term product vision and strategy for the Search and Recommendation product domain, ensuring alignment with overall company objectives.
• Deeply understand customer needs, market trends, and competitive landscapes to identify new opportunities for innovation in discovery and personalization.
• Establish a clear roadmap, setting measurable goals and success metrics (e.g., search precision, recall, conversion rate uplift, engagement).

• Lead the entire product development lifecycle from ideation and discovery through planning, execution, and post‑launch optimisation.
• Partner with Engineering and Data Science to define technical requirements and trade‑offs for algorithms, machine learning models, and complex data infrastructure supporting search relevancy and personalisation.
• Drive rigorous A/B testing and experimentation to validate hypotheses, iterate on features, and continuously improve core metrics.
• Maintain a well‑groomed and prioritised backlog, ensuring the team is consistently focused on the highest‑impact initiatives.
• Own and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) related to search and recommendation performance, including relevancy metrics, query success rates, and user behaviour flows.
• Leverage quantitative data, qualitative user research, and competitive analysis to inform product decisions and identify areas for algorithmic improvement.
• Work closely with Data Science and BI teams to ensure accurate tracking, reporting, and analysis of all search and recommendation experiences.

• Act as the primary subject matter expert for Search & Recommendation, effectively communicating product strategy, progress, and results to executive stakeholders and cross‑functional teams.
• Collaborate closely with product design to create seamless, intuitive interfaces and integrate recommendation into the user journey across multiple products.
• Partner with Research, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support to ensure successful go‑to‑market strategies and gather holistic feedback on product performance.

• 5+ years of experience in Product Management, with at least 3 years directly focused on search, information retrieval, ranking, NLP, recommendation systems.
• Proven experience working closely with Data Scientists and Machine Learning engineers on developing and deploying complex, data‑driven products.
• Deep technical fluency in how search algorithms, relevancy models, and personalization systems (e.g., collaborative filtering, deep learning models) function and are evaluated.
• Proven experience to drive customer analysis and own the end‑to‑end customer experience, from inception to delivery and subsequent evolution.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills, with expertise in defining KPIs, conducting A/B tests, and synthesising quantitative data to drive product decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of presenting complex technical concepts and product strategies to a diverse audience.
• Experience working in a high‑scale, consumer‑facing or e‑commerce environment.
• Familiarity with modern search technologies and cloud‑based ML/AI platforms.
• A strong sense of ownership and a bias for action, coupled with the ability to manage ambiguity and rapidly evolving priorities.
• Experience with Digital Transformation program and transition of…