Lead Product Manager - Search

Why loveholidays?

At loveholidays - we trailblaze together. We’re on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers’ unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next getaway. Our team is the driving force behind our role as our customers’ personal holiday expert - the smart way to get away.

We’re using progressive tech to drive cutting-edge innovation and open the world to everyone. Within our Commercial and Support teams, you'll find a place to accelerate your growth by actively seeking learning opportunities and carving your own path. You'll create impact for our future by owning projects and shaping the business strategy to reach shared goals, all within our enhanced international community of collaborative and passionate teams.

About The Team

The Search Platform team is responsible for taking our billions of package offers and ensuring the customer can find the best value holiday for them quickly and easily, whilst enabling non-engineers to make configuration changes. The sphere of influence is full-stack, from handling massive amounts of data in the back-end, to the sophisticated search UI, where the trick is to provide the customer with everything they could need without overwhelming them.

Search Platform is part of the Selling department, which is responsible for building the best holiday search experience for customers - searching through billions of offers and ensuring a seamless checkout experience through both our app and web. The Selling department’s areas of responsibility include search, checkout, revenue management, content engineering, performance marketing and customer relationship management.

What You Can Expect

Reporting to a Head of Product, you will be instrumental in defining and delivering the long-term product vision for loveholidays' holiday search, aligning it with both business and market contexts. As Lead Product Manager for our "crown jewel" search capabilities, you will:

• Lead Product Strategy: Drive product strategy across the entire search domain, thinking long-term and translating ambiguity into clear priorities. You will align cross-functional teams (engineering, design, and data) around shared, ambitious goals.
• Identify Bold Opportunities: Proactively spot product opportunities for search based on deep customer problems, emerging market trends, and internal performance gaps. You will leverage data, insights, and cutting-edge research to influence key decisions and guide strategic thinking.
• Champion Customer-Centricity: Embed a strong discovery culture across your area and others, continuously surfacing blind spots and challenging assumptions to uncover untapped opportunities in holiday search.
• Drive Innovation with AI: Set a compelling vision for how data and experimentation, particularly advanced AI and machine learning approaches, will create a superior holiday search product.
• Influence Company-Level Strategy: Collaborate with senior leaders to shape loveholidays' priorities, confidently navigating complex stakeholder dynamics and influencing where we grow and lead, supporting loveholidays’ mission to open the world to everyone.
  
  

Your Day-to-day

At loveholidays, we always strive to improve, and we like people willing to get hands on and drive change. In this role, that might look like:

• Strategic Planning: Collaborating with your lead engineers and relevant commercial teams to design the overarching vision for holiday search, then devising the comprehensive strategy and roadmap to achieve it.
• Complex Delivery Leadership: Leading complex, high-impact initiatives across holiday search product areas, guiding teams through ambiguity, and building/adjusting prioritisation and delivery plans that balance short-term wins with long-term value, all while creating the focus that allows for delivery at pace.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Guiding your team to use insight confidently, from setting metrics to defining test plans, spotting patterns across customer journeys, and shaping strategy based on what the data means. This includes interrogating and creating dashboards to understand trends over time.
• Advanced Problem Solving: Leading discovery from insight gathering to concept testing for complex search problems, leveraging qualitative and quantitative methods, and reframing problems with clear insights, especially around applying bleeding-edge AI to enhance search.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Creating crisp narratives that build understanding, influence others, and enable effective decision-making, particularly when presenting to senior stakeholders. You will remove barriers to collaboration across loveholidays, championing customer and business goals.
• Technical Partnership: Partnering with engineering leads to shape architectural decisions that fully support ambitious product growth in holiday search, driving the prioritisation of platform and performance improvements that unlock scale.
  
  

Your Skillset

• Exceptional Strategic Thinking: A proven track record of identifying bold opportunities and influencing where an organisation grows and leads, with the ability to define long-term product visions.
• Deep Customer & Commercial Insight: You anticipate long-term shifts in the industry and identify where loveholidays can lead, making bold strategic recommendations based on clear commercial insight and market foresight, with a profound understanding of customer behaviour in holiday search.
• Mastery of Execution & Delivery: You define scalable delivery and prioritisation practices, leading with calm judgment, balancing trade-offs, and building a culture of decisive, data-informed execution.
• Superior Communication & Collaboration: You can communicate product vision in ways that energise and align people across the organisation and beyond, expertly navigating complex stakeholder dynamics and building relationships with leaders.
• Advanced Data & Experimentation: You set a vision for how data and experimentation drive better product thinking, ensuring every significant bet is grounded in insight, from early discovery to long-term strategy, and championing a culture of fast learning. You are comfortable working in SQL directly with our data, pulling together insights for all levels to understand, and developing a peer relationship with our in-house data science and analytics teams.
• Profound Technical Awareness: You design roadmaps that align product ambition with technical direction and platform strategy, anticipating technical risks and opportunities as loveholidays scales, and championing technical excellence in product planning, particularly regarding AI implementation.
• Proven Product Ownership: A proven track-record of end-to-end ownership and delivery of products solving complex customer/company problems.
• Experience with AI/ML: You have had exposure to solutions powered by AI or ML and are keen to learn and develop in this area.
  
  

Perks Of Joining Us

• Company pension contributions at 5%
• Individualised training budget for you to learn on the job and level yourself up
• Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends
• 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum
• Ability to buy and sell annual leave
• Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers
  
  

At loveholidays, we focus on developing an inclusive culture and environment that encourages personal growth and collective success. Each individual offers unique perspectives and ideas that increase the diversity and effectiveness of our teams. And we value the insight and potential you could bring on our continued journey.

The Interview Journey

Guidance: Setting expectations for what the candidate can expect the interview process to look like from our side - aiming to keep this brief but informative

Example.

• Talent Intro - 30 mins
• 1st stage with Hiring Manager - 45 mins
• Final stage with key stakeholder/s including a task to present, in office - 1 hour
• Behavioural / Culture fit with team - 45 mins