VP Product

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world’s leading brands and stores. We are a scale-up business, combining an agile mentality with a proven business model and over a decade of experience. This provides a balance between foundations and structure, and autonomy and pace.

At Lyst we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn’t, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better decisions and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper. Lyst has raised over $160m from leading investors including Accel, Balderton, Molten Ventures, Fidelity International, and LVMH.

Role

We have an exciting opportunity for an exceptional product leader with a proven track record of developing product strategies that improve customer and/or user outcomes. This role will have a broad remit across both the consumer and partner side of the Lyst marketplace, and will be a critical catalyst for a conscious shift towards building more long term customer value into the platform.

The VP Product will be involved in all phases of the product lifecycle, shaping product strategy with the executive and leadership teams, initiating discovery work supported by quantitative and qualitative research, through to the execution of roadmaps across multiple product teams. Lyst product teams use a hypothesis driven approach, in which ideas for product changes are validated through experiments or research prior to building a solution fit for scale. The VP Product will need to be comfortable working in this ambiguous space, where bets that take multiple cycles to pay off are the norm, and delivering the vision requires resilience, imagination and strong commercial acumen.

Lyst fosters a culture that supports high levels of cross-functional collaboration and drive to make an impact. We encourage our leaders to continuously improve alignment through storytelling and anchoring teams to shared goals. In the product discipline, this demands a strong grasp of sometimes complex technical issues, command of context including competitive landscape, behavioural or performance data, user research, design perspective, and the ability to communicate inspiringly. 

The role covers a wide range of product surfaces: one day the topic may be new ad media products, the next AI driven semantic search, or a new solution for solving fit problems. Fashion tech is at an inflexion point where we believe new AI capabilities will unlock solutions for old fashion shopper problems, and fashion retailer problems. This role will be at the centre of defining those problems better, and building the right solutions to address them.

Responsibilities:

The VP Product will be responsible for devising and executing product strategies across affiliate and full checkout e-commerce journeys. Key responsibilities include:

• Identify opportunities from data and research, synthesise key themes, opportunities, pain points, and help shape and develop Lyst wide strategies for building a highly retentive customer and partner experience
• Create, communicate, and operationalise a strategy and roadmap that enables Lyst to build the products and services that will change how people shop for fashion, globally
• Manage the effective delivery of product iterations across multiple teams: align teams to measurable outcomes, track progress, communicate results, and strive to continuously improve software delivery with high impact
• Mentor and manage 3 to 4 Product Managers to help them achieve their goals and become outstanding Product Managers
• Foster healthy team dynamics across product, engineering, design, marketing, and partnerships to ensure high levels of collaboration and actualisation
• Partner with engineering and design leadership to continuously improve execution of the product lifecycle
• Study the market and competitive landscape to push strategies that drive competitive advantage
• Contribute to shaping the company roadmap, planning, and budgeting processes.
• Serve as a leader within the Product & Design Chapter, providing best practices and offering guidance for product teams in engaging with the product life cycle
• Integrate data, research and other inputs into product planning to ensure customer satisfaction and commercial success

• An established Product Leader with the ability to operate at a senior level in a high performance tech environment
• Demonstrable experience of working on critical, highly visible B2C or platform projects that drive long term customer and business impact
• Strong technical background with an understanding of software development, services, working with engineering teams, and the delivery and use of data products
• Experience of working on data, machine learning or AI-driven products and/or features
• Experience taking an experimentation-driven approach to product development
• Strong commercial and analytical capabilities with previous experience of sizing opportunities by analysing patterns in customer behaviour
• Able to demonstrate structured thinking within a complex domain at a strategic level, in order to effectively prioritise for maximum impact and set long term direction
• Ability to communicate an inter-connected strategic narrative that will align and inspire product teams
• Experience coaching and line managing a team of Product Managers
• A sense of pragmatism. A capacity to go deep in order to understand both risks and opportunities, and then see the bigger picture and make good decisions.
• Ability to expertly navigate stakeholders across multiple disciplines, influencing and shaping decision making to achieve alignment
• A passionate and creative problem solver with the optimism and energy to deliver results even against the odds. 
• An agent of change; constantly seeking to identify improved and smarter ways of working that drive efficiency and results.

• Our Ways of Working: We all come into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.
• Time Off: In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
• Competitive Family Leave Package: This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.
• Clothing Benefit: We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service.
• Private Healthcare: Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start.
• Training Allowance: We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.
• Pension Scheme: Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.
• Eye Tests and Vouchers: Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.
• Cycle-to-Work Scheme: Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them.
• Transport Season Ticket Loan: Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.
• Social Events: Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.

We want to build a world where fashion works for everyone, and we want teams that are just as inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture at Lyst. We recognise and celebrate the value and impact diversity brings to our company and are committed to ensuring this is a consistent focus, for which we are held to account. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this role. We are happy to talk about flexible working arrangements.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Lyst we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.