Head of Product & Product Design in London

Who are we? Hi, we're Tails.com - we turn good days into great years for dogs and their humans. We're working towards longer lives for millions of healthy, happy dogs by providing tailored nutrition that adapts to each dog's unique needs. It all starts with a few simple questions about their age, breed, zoomie level and tastebuds. From there, owners can create a personalised meal plan that's delivered to their door every month. No guesswork, no overwhelm. Just exactly the right care for every dog, every day. It's pretty clever stuff. As a certified B Corp, being a responsible business is built into how we work - upholding high social and environmental standards to create better walkies for generations to come. Now, we're cooking up big plans. Having created an entirely new category in dog food, we have the backing of Purina - one of the world's largest pet food companies. You'll join a bunch of smart people working towards these same goals (and a bunch of very smart office dogs, all working on their own thing).

Overview Of The Job

This is a senior leadership role responsible for setting the product vision, strategy and ways of working across Product Management and Product Design at Tails.com. In this role, you'll lead and grow a high-performing team of 5 Product Managers and 4 Product Designers, ensuring we create compelling digital and physical experiences that delight our customers and deliver meaningful commercial impact. You'll work closely with senior leaders across Engineering, Commercial, Marketing, Data and the wider business to shape priorities, guide investment decisions and ensure products and services are successfully delivered from ideation through launch and beyond. This role is a blend of strategic leadership and hands-on product stewardship, stretching from shaping company-level strategy to ensuring teams are set up to deliver high-quality outcomes through strong discovery, delivery and continuous improvement.

3 Best Things About The Job

• Digital experiences with a physical consequence. Here you get to build digital experiences that have immediate physical consequences. The algorithms and journeys you are in charge of, lead to personalisation that is more than just Marketing fluff, it creates a fully customised meal plan designed to help dogs live longer.
• Shape the direction of the company and the product strategy. Use your knowledge and expertise to feed back up into the business direction and strategy and translate long-term company goals into a concrete product strategy and roadmap, acting as a strong bridge to unite engineering, design, marketing and more around one excellent digital experience.
• Shape how product operates, not just what gets shipped. You're inheriting a talented team of PMs and Designers, with a good foundation. The opportunity is now upgrading the operating model that gives them a clear craft standard, embedding strong discovery and experimentation habits, and protecting their space to solve real problems.

Measures of success – In the first few months, you would have:

• Got to know your team inside and out. You know what makes each PM and Designer tick, what’s currently holding them back, and where they need your backing or coaching.
• Built honest relationships across the business. You've spent time with Engineering, Customer, Marketing, Data, Ops leads and more, cementing how Product partners with them day to day.
• Wrapped your head around the business model and digital experience. You understand our subscription unit economics, retention levers, and how digital decisions actually affect operations. You know the digital experience well now, and can confidently map opportunities to the right part of the customer journey.
• Led your first quarterly planning cycle. You helped your team turn competing stakeholder priorities and problems to solve into a clear, focused roadmap that is bold and contributes to commercial targets but realistic and ensures smooth running in teams.
• Spotted the friction points in how we work. You've identified the first pragmatic improvements to our discovery, experimentation or delivery habits, without trying to rewrite the entire playbook on day one.

Roles & Responsibilities

• People Leading, mentoring, inspiring and developing Product Management and Product Design into a high-performing, outcomes-focused function within the business. Setting and embedding best practice across product management and product design, including discovery, test-and-learn approaches, stakeholder communication, customer engagement, analytics and experimentation.
• Product Ensuring products and services are successfully delivered end to end, from ideation and discovery through launch, iteration and continuous improvement. Building, owning and championing a culture of accountability, with clear ownership of metrics and outcomes, and reporting that meets the needs of different stakeholder groups. Owning and evolving the overall product vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with company strategy and clear articulation of customer and commercial value. Contributing to the assessment and prioritisation of strategic and large-scale initiatives, bringing product leadership expertise to shape direction, sequencing and investment decisions.
• Process Partnering closely with the Leadership team to build and maintain a product roadmap that balances customer needs, commercial impact, team capacity and long-term strategy. Representing product and design to leadership and the business. Working in deep partnership with senior leaders across Engineering, Research, Brand, Marketing and other functions to build strong relationships, enable effective decision-making and drive successful delivery.

What you will need

• Significant experience as a Head of Product, Group Product Manager or Lead Product Manager, with a proven track record of building, leading and developing teams of both PMs and Designers.

Specifically for this Role

• Build trust through transparency and proactive communication, especially with hands-on senior stakeholders.
• Strong instincts for organisational design, not just people leadership, including levelling, competencies and future resourcing.
• Energised by building structure rather than expecting it to already exist.
• Hands-on people leadership. Regular 1:1s, visible career development and proactive check-ins aren't optional extras here, they're core to the role.
• Comfortable quantifying the revenue impact of product decisions and holding your own in financial and commercial forums.
• Confidence to hold product boundaries with other functions, protecting the team's ability to own problems, not just execute requests.
• Experienced leading designers, directly or through a design lead. Holds design to customer and commercial outcomes, and trusts the Design Lead to own craft, quality and how the design team runs day to day.

Classic Product Skills

• Defines and delivers product strategy and roadmaps tied to clear business, customer and commercial outcomes.
• Applies product discovery to ambiguous, complex problems and turns them into clear goals and plans.
• Influences prioritisation and decision-making at senior levels across the organisation.
• Builds experimentation and testing into ways of working, not just intuition-led bets.
• Works as a true peer to engineering, not just a requester of delivery.
• Deep passion for commercially viable, omnichannel customer experiences.

Nice to have

• Experience applying AI to product workflows to improve speed and/or quality.
• Experience in D2C subscription businesses.
• Experience of running a product department during a digital transformation.

A few of our core benefits

• Private Healthcare through AXA.
• A 9 day fortnight - our office is closed every other Friday!
• 25 days of Annual Leave and 8 additional remote working days.

Our Commitment

We're proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are under-represented at Tails.com. During your interview process you'll meet some of our team with varying levels of responsibility and experience. We want to give every candidate a fair interview process and if you need any reasonable adjustments made, please let us know.