Role: Director of Product

Location: London, on-site

** Visa sponsorship is available for this role**

We’re looking for a Director of Product to help lead us into the next chapter of growth. If you’re deeply passionate about solving real world problems, and get a kick out of turning chaos into clarity then keep reading.

Schools in the UK and US spend over £12bn a year on agency staff, and £3.6bn of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies. That’s why we’ve built an alternative.

Zen is an all-in-one digital platform that gives schools full control over how they find, vet, and manage temporary educators. Think “tech startup,” but solving a painfully human, operational, and systemic issue in education staffing. Our platform is built to be scalable and intuitive, designed in close collaboration with schools and educators to fit seamlessly into existing school workflows. School leaders can search, book, and manage staff in real time, while gaining full visibility and control over their spend and compliance. 

• A real-time booking platform used daily by thousands of schools and educators.

• Compliance and payroll infrastructure that automates complex tasks

• Tools that save our internal ops team hours a day and scale our service

• £30M+ saved for schools so far, and counting

But the next phase? That's bigger. And that’s where you come in. You’ll be reinventing how schools find and trust the people teaching our kids.

You’ve led a prod org with multiple teams. You obsess over customer needs, and know how to balance shipping fast with building right. You’re as comfortable in the weeds as you are aligning strategy with execs. You set a high-bar for your team and are skilled at coaching them to be the best versions of themselves.

• You drive clarity in ambiguity

• You care more about real world outcomes than rigid roadmaps

• You’re product led, not process led

• You can align teams, not just ideas

• You love finding simple answers to complex problems

This isn’t a Chief Strategy Officer role in disguise. It’s a builder role. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Design, Ops, and Sales to shape and scale the products that power Zen.

You’ll join a high-performing team that’s already shipping daily, and you’ll help us level up how we:

• Define the product strategy and vision for the short-term, medium-term, and long-term

• Drive the culture of the entire organisation to be product first

• Roll out new products as we extend our offering beyond the core marketplace to Human Capital Management software for Schools. You’ll have experience rapidly iterating to land product-market fit of new products while not losing sight of a core product in hypergrowth

• Be a key member of the management team working closely with your counterparts across the organisation to deliver outcomes that matter

• Build and coach a high functioning product delivery org - you’ll inherit a great team of PMs and you’ll coach them to be generational talents in their domain

• Support the priorities of multiple teams without losing focus on the bigger picture

Along the way, you’ll probably try three experiments and two of them might fail. That’s fine with us. We value thoughtful risk-taking, fast learning, and momentum over perfection. Our only competitive advantage is the velocity of learning.

Who you’ll work with 

We’re a 300+ (and growing!) team operating across the UK, US, and Canada. We’re well funded, default alive, growing fast, and have tremendous unit economics. Simply put, we’re doing really well by doing good. As such, we’re a passionate group of missionaries rather than mercenaries. We’re looking to find someone who shares our passion for the mission of making education better. 

Every place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them.

• Outcomes over dogma - we’re practical in trying to drive an outcome. That means we make tradeoffs to lean heavier on other levers like sales and operations when it makes commercial sense to do so. We want a leader who will obsess about driving a Product First culture, but understand that Product is one of many ways we win

• First principles reasoning rather than replicating other companies best practices - we believe every situation has nuance. Experience is an input in decision making, but not the only input. The executives at Zen that do best are endlessly curious and looking to deconstruct problems to first principles. They’re not just making decisions because they’ve seen them work at previous companies.

• Slope and passion over Y Intercept. High-trajectory individuals with a passion for what they do very quickly lap those with a higher initial starting point in their domain but slower trajectory. That means Executives at Zen often end up spending more time up-front investing in the upskilling of colleagues from non-traditional backgrounds but it quickly pays dividends many times over.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re excited then hit apply. If the timing isn’t right or you’re not sure it’s a right fit, reach out anyway. We’re always open to talking to those who believe in our mission. 

Let’s build something that actually matters.