Social Surveys Director (accelerated VP path) in London

Reporting to the Founder & CEO | London (Shoreditch) | Full-time | A written development path to VP

ABOUT THIS THAT

Marketing has three eras, each with a north star. Mass media: reach. Personalisation: effectiveness. The community era: influence. Nielsen owned the measurement standard for mass media. Kantar owned it for personalisation. The community era has no governing standard yet. ThisThat is building it.

Every measurement standard stood on a collection breakthrough. Nielsen wired meters into living rooms. Kantar built the access panel. Panels are big and getting bigger, but none of them capture true exposure on social. We do: we re-target the people who were genuinely exposed to a campaign in the real world, in their natural environment. We mastered gamification and the intrinsic motivation to complete surveys when we were a social media platform ourselves. Respondents fall asleep with everyone else's questionnaires. Ours get completed.

Trusted by Unilever, Google, Publicis, WPP, and many more. Three-time winner of Best Influencer Marketing Technology.

THE ROLE

A business within the business, with you as its owner. While the rest of the company sells intelligence to brands, this arm builds for real people. The customer is the respondent. You own the product (the gamified survey experience with 10x completion rates), the brand respondents and creators love, the performance engine (the creative and the paid machine), the team that builds it, and the economics that make it a moat. Social Surveys means surveys collected where people are social: today through social ads across creator audiences; we were born a social media app, and that route can come back.

Your north star is CPI: cost per interview, quality gated. An interview that fails quality does not count. CPI is won across six drivers: audience size, CPM, CTR, click-to-response, question-three retention, and completion rate. Wins at every driver compound, and no driver in the middle belongs to one craft alone: paid, creative, tech and design overlap. You run them as one flywheel.

The craft the seat runs on is the learning agenda; continuous compounding test and ever-evolving best practices. This is how the founder runs the function today. You inherit the system, run it without him in the loop, and teach it to everyone you hire.

You sell internally like a supplier. The solutions team briefs you like a client and sets the methodology bar: quality SLAs, CPI targets, compliance guarantees. Your team executes the full exposure group, social and panel fieldwork; panel vendor relationships sit with Solutions. You run the how of collection, never the why of methodology.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Chair the CPI Lab: run the working group, own the sign-offs and R&D budget, carry CPI targets on every priority platform
• Manage the paid media team from day one: two experienced specialists in seat, a Paid Media Associate Director in New York, and a Paid Media Manager who run social survey data collection and client communication daily
• Set the standard for client-facing aspects of the paid delivery team. You're a player coach and support with escalations as they brief and guide clients through exposure group setup, creator opt-ins and audience building
• Own the paid capacity model: the demand-driven hiring triggers that scale the team
• Be the cleanest, best-loved social surveying advertiser on every platform, and begin the multi-year build toward direct platform integrations
• Own the gamified survey experience and build brand with respondents and creators, so the moment our ad lands in an exposed person's feed, they recognise us, click, and complete
• Meet the quality bar the solutions team sets
• Equip our team, self-serve clients, sales and marketing with the collection knowledge they need

THE TEAM YOU WILL BUILD

You join with the paid media team in seat, and the build runs experience-first: a design sprint lands a validated direction before engineers arrive. By July 2027 the full machine is hired:

• The product designer is the first hire of the wave and owns the survey experience, the heart of the moat: every screen, every reason a real person completes instead of dropping
• Engineers own the tech enabling creator opt-ins, audience building and turning a click into a complete: survey UX, pixel, page speed, ad automation
• The content creator makes creative native to each platform, humanises ThisThat, and builds brand love with respondents and creators, measured on click-to-response
• Paid media runs the platforms, budgets, daily optimisation and client communication, scaled by the capacity model you own

This is a B2C team inside a B2B company, with a product that is both the respondent's experience and supply for the insights function. You design this org, write its role specs, hire it, and run it as one flywheel.

THE PATH TO VP

This role has a designed development path to VP Social Surveys.

First 90 days, take the machine:

• Own the paid engine through the team, with no quality drops
• Take the CPI Lab chair
• Complete the founder curriculum: the learning agenda system, respondent psychology, CPI as the language, product thinking

Days 90 to 180, prove the system:

• CPI improvements on benchmark across priority platforms, with the quality bar held throughout
• CPI Lab playbooks a new hire could run the whole machine from alone, including mastering new platforms
• Quality SLAs agreed with Solutions and met for a full quarter
• The London paid seat(s), product designer, product engineer and content creator hired and line-managed by you

A formal review takes place in July 2027 and at six-month intervals thereafter, against three criteria every ThisThat VP clears, plus a fourth unique to this seat:

• Leads beyond the function: you operate as a leader across the leadership team, carrying problems that belong to no single team
• Drives revenue: the machine wins and keeps revenue, with collection economics that protect margin and quality that lands in renewals
• Delivers through the team: collection ships to production standard through your team, built on systems rather than the heroics of any individual
• Earns the green light for the next act: bringing the social media app we were born as back to life, as creators' favourite survey tool. The value exchange: qualified creators get our tech at significant discounts (possibly free), predictive brand lift to improve their content and charge fairly for their work; in return they survey their audiences through us, recruiting communities we can ask again and again. And every brand lift study we already run feeds it: a post-complete conversion into the app. When the founder is convinced you are the person to lead it, he hands you the keys

Promotion is assessed on evidence, in our reasonable judgement: a schedule of proof, not a contractual guarantee of promotion by any date. You get 18 months shoulder to shoulder with the founder in London before he relocates to New York in 2028; then the autonomy is real.

WHO ARE YOU

An experimentation track record with written artifacts, the core skill of the seat: show us your learning agenda and a test where the obvious metric was lying and you caught it

8+ years owning a consumer funnel end to end, including the post-click half. You might be a Head of Growth at a consumer app or marketplace, a gaming UA lead whose north star was cost per install and whose craft was creative testing and retention curves, or a performance-led B2C product leader

Product management fluency: daily work with engineers and designers, roadmaps shaped against a funnel, levers and second-order effects, not channels

Deep paid social experience is a must: you have lived inside ads managers and can coach senior specialists without doing their job

Team leadership across disciplines and locations, remote included

Founder energy, ideally an ex-founder: you have built something from scratch and you are product and growth obsessed, thinking about it night and day. This job does not exist anywhere else.

KEY SKILLS

• Analytically ruthless: reads a funnel daily, designs the test that isolates the variable
• A product manager's reflexes: when a platform retains deep into a survey and then collapses, your first question is about the experience, not the ad
• A creative streak: you will direct gamification, survey experience and native creative. Pure spreadsheet operators will not enjoy this job
• Rigorous and repeatable: hypotheses before spend, snapshots before opinions, playbooks before scale
• Commercially fluent: every pound off CPI is margin, every quality miss is a client conversation
• Low ego, high standards, never satisfied: sells internally like a supplier, treats rejections as the system working, and is constitutionally incapable of leaving a number where it is

WHY JOIN

Every measurement standard was built by someone who solved data collection. Nielsen wired TVs. Kantar built panels. The community era has no equivalent yet. You're taking our award winning solution and making it the standard.

Base Salary of £80,000 - £100,000, rising up to £120,000 at VP level

Share options so you benefit from our success

28 days paid holiday plus bank holidays

Hybrid & flexible working (working from the office 3x per week) - and dogs are welcome at our Shoreditch office!

Access to our Benefits package, to support your health and happiness

Regular (optional) socials and away days

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

ThisThat is committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace where all team members feel valued and empowered. We celebrate the unique perspectives and backgrounds of our employees and believe that diversity drives innovation and excellence. ThisThat is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all races, national origins, genders, gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, abilities, veteran statuses, and other legally protected characteristics. If you need accommodations during the application process, please contact us.