Lead Product Manager - Pricing & Data Platform

COMPANY OVERVIEW

At World of Books, we’re on a mission to become the Planet’s Bookstore.

Our business was founded in 2002 with the purpose of encouraging recycling, minimising waste and fostering sustainability by giving books a second life. Since then, we’ve grown into the world’s largest seller of used books, providing millions of customers with an affordable way to discover, purchase and enjoy books sustainably.

We have offices in the UK, US and Hungary, with over 1,000 employees dedicated to continuing to do good, protect the environment and support charities – as reflected in our certified B-Corp status.

Our lines of business:

• World of Books: The UK’s largest online retailer of used (and new!) books, reaching customers in over 190 countries through direct-to-consumer channels, marketplaces (e.g. Amazon and eBay) and wholesale partners. In the UK, >50% of sales are through the direct-to-consumer channel, which is also growing at pace in the US.

• World of Rare Books: Specialists in rare, vintage and first edition books, providing one of Europe’s largest collections of pre-ISBN and decorative vintage books.

• Sell Your Books (SYB): An innovative app-based service enabling customers to scan barcodes or tap ISBN codes from their books for instant valuations and hassle-free resale.

• Sell Your Books Pro (SYBP): A SaaS product capable of scanning products on an industrial level, enabling organisations such as national charities to sell us their books, generate additional revenue for good causes and enable more items to be reused.

Our business model is underpinned by a combination of proprietary and off-the-shelf technology which enables us to dynamically select and price items. This means we’re able to offer customers a unique range of products across a range of channels and at prices that cannot be found elsewhere.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Over the next few years, World of Books plans to accelerate growth as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) eCommerce business. We’re enhancing our dynamic pricing, inventory management, warehousing operations and data capabilities to continue scaling internationally and at pace. Central to this is our investment in our pricing platform and data infrastructure – ensuring we have a scalable, high-quality data platform that powers our pricing algorithms, analytics, machine-learning and operational decision-making.

As Lead Product Manager of Pricing & Data Platform, you’ll be responsible for leading the product strategy and execution across two closely related product-engineering teams:

1. Pricing Product Team – collaborating closely with data scientists and commercial partners, this team is responsible for our pricing platform that enables data scientists to rapidly test, run and deploy new pricing algorithms across all our buying and selling channels, ultimately delivering pricing systems that deliver sales and profit.

1. Data Platform Team – this team is responsible for building, developing and maintaining our data warehouse and data pipelines. Our data warehouse is a critical enabler to the entire business, and serves a huge amount of use cases, such as business insight, product analytics, and data science applications including pricing.

Reporting to the Product Director, you’ll work closely with data engineers, platform and infrastructure teams, pricing analysts, data scientists and business stakeholders to ensure we have robust, scalable and performant systems that drive customer and commercial value.

What you’ll be doing:

• Owning the end-to-end product vision, strategy and roadmap for the data platform and pricing systems – including ingestion, processing, and algorithmic decisioning.
• Driving enhancements to the infrastructure that powers our pricing models, ensuring systems are scalable, flexible and responsive to changing business conditions.
• Collaborating closely with engineering, design, data and commercial teams to define requirements, prioritise features and drive execution.
• Establishing clear product priorities and delivery plans that balance foundational improvements with speed-to-value.
• Developing an in-depth understanding of our customers, leveraging qualitative and quantitative insights to make informed, strategic product decisions. You’ll have access to stakeholders across the business with deep expertise in the books and recommerce industries to help create distinctive products that differentiate us from our competitors.
• Defining and monitoring success metrics across platform performance, data quality, pricing impact, and stakeholder satisfaction.
• Serving as a trusted partner to both internal and external stakeholders, consistently championing outstanding customer experiences and product quality.
• Driving adoption of data platform capabilities across the organisation by developing clear, user-friendly services and interfaces that make data accessible and usable for analysts, data scientists, engineers and decision-makers.
• Moving fast, prioritising initiatives decisively and embracing pragmatism over theoretical product perfection.

Within your first year in the role, we anticipate that you will have demonstrated excellent progress towards the following key milestones and deliverables:

• Defined a clear product strategy and roadmap for both teams that align to delivering the goals of our overall business strategy
• Pricing – all WoB channels and products live on our new platform, delivering improved sales and profit.
• Data Platform - significant progress towards delivering the refactor of our Data warehouse platform and new data sets delivering business value.

What we’re looking for:

We’re looking for a technically adept, commercially-minded product leader with a strong track record of delivering data or platform products that power complex business systems.

Key attributes:

• Significant experience as a product manager working on data platforms, pricing systems, infrastructure or systems products (e.g. data pipelines, data warehouses, event-based architecture, pricing engines).
• Strong understanding of cloud-native data stack components (e.g., Google BigQuery, DBT)
• Experience working with or supporting pricing, yield management or algorithm-driven decision-making platforms, ideally in eCommerce or high-volume transactional environments.
• 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
• Demonstrable ability to create impactful product roadmaps and deliver results.
• Deep understanding of how to work effectively with cross-functional teams (data scientists, analysts, engineers and commercial stakeholders) to define needs and translate them into value-creating capabilities.
• Strong commercial acumen, an affinity for data and the ability to make informed, pragmatic decisions based on incomplete or imperfect information.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and influencing abilities at all organisational levels. We’re looking for someone capable of raising the bar for product leadership in one of our core growth levers.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, prioritising execution and iterative improvement.
• Proactive mindset with the capability to independently drive initiatives and influence leadership.

LOCATION

• London (~3 days a week), with some travel to our other offices in the UK (Coventry and West Sussex), US (Illinois) and Hungary on an ad hoc basis.

WHY JOIN WORLD OF BOOKS?

We believe in building great things with great people. As a values-driven organisation, we:

• Work as one team, fostering collaboration across all functions.
• Are customer-obsessed, ensuring everything we build delivers value.
• Simplify, move fast, and deliver results, embracing agility and innovation.
• Protect the environment, making sustainability the core of everything we do.

This is an opportunity to lead game-changing innovation in our marketplace, shaping how millions of books are bought and sold every year.