Senior Product Manager
Role: Senior Product Manager
Location: UK, London
Job type: Full time, permanent – hybrid
This position offers a hybrid work model, allowing flexibility between working from home and our office. Typically, employees are expected to work 2 days in the office per week.
Why QS?
At QS, we believe that work should empower you. That’s why we foster a flexible working environment that encourages every employee to own their career whilst flourishing personally and professionally. Our company values underpin everything we do – we collaborate, respect and support each other.
It’s our mission to empower motivated people around the world to fulfil their potential through higher education, ensuring that everyone has access to opportunities that change lives.
Our diversity makes us stronger. By sharing our experiences, we learn from one another and achieve more together, driving progress across the sector.
At QS, you’ll be responsible for implementing real change in the international higher education landscape. You’ll take on meaningful challenges that see a positive impact across the business and the wider sector.
We’re confident you’ll feel right at home here. QS was named as one of Newsweek’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® in the UK (October 2023), recognising the respect, trust and appreciation that drive our culture every day. And as a gold-accredited Investors in People organisation – putting us among the top 28% of workplaces globally – it’s official: QS is a place where everyone can thrive.
As a Senior Product Manager, this is what you’ll be doing:
QS is seeking a Senior Product Manager, Product-Led Growth (PLG) to own the end-to-end student and partner journey - from anonymous visit through logged-in engagement to enrolment.
You will shape front-end and logged-in experiences to accelerate time-to-first-value, deepen engagement and improve retention, embedding intelligence and personalisation to boost decision confidence. Operating horizontally across product and growth teams, you’ll align and sequence initiatives with regional, marketing and university partners to balance global scalability with local nuance. Success is measured by conversion, activation, engagement depth, retention and enrolment impact; the role reports to a senior product leader and is based in a QS hub with hybrid working.
- Own the full funnel, treating conversion and activation as product design challenges.
- Lead experimentation across anonymous and logged-in journeys to drive measurable uplift.
- Evolve identity, preferences and personalised matching to reduce friction and improve decision confidence.
- Influence across teams to deliver cohesive journeys that improve partner enrolment outcomes
Role responsibilities
Product strategy and delivery
- Own the end-to-end product journey from traffic to enrolment; define outcome-led roadmaps aligned to growth objectives.
- Translate strategy into clear backlog priorities, user stories, and delivery plans; manage trade-offs and timelines.
- Design front-end experiences that convert traffic into curiosity and intent; define first-value moments that move users from browsing to meaningful engagement.
- Lead evolution of logged-in experiences (identity, preferences, personalisation); remove friction across discovery, engagement, application, and post-intent journeys.
Discovery, relevance, and matching
- Treat discovery and relevance as core capabilities; increase decision confidence and reduce cognitive load.
- Embed intelligence (recommendations, demand signals, relevance scoring) to guide students and improve matching.
Experimentation and analytics
- Define and run A/B, multivariate, and cohort experiments across anonymous and logged-in journeys.
- Use behavioural, cohort, and funnel data to prioritise, instrument, and measure impact; optimise for learning velocity and conversion uplift.
- Establish experiment charters, success thresholds, and guardrails; ensure robust analytics and reporting.
- Partner with Data and Engineering to ensure key journeys are correctly instrumented and insights are reliable.
Lifecycle and CRM enablement
- Own product requirements for lifecycle and CRM-enabled experiences; ensure off-site touchpoints reinforce in-product behaviour.
- Maintain a product-led approach to lifecycle, driven by in-product signals rather than campaign cadence.
Cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management
- Partner closely with Product, UX, Engineering, Data, CRM/lifecycle, Content/SEO, and Growth teams to align end-to-end journeys.
- Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders; influence horizontally without direct line management.
Other
- Any other duties that fall within the purpose and scope of the role
Success milestones:
- 3 months: Diagnose funnel opportunities, set baselines, build prioritised roadmap and experiment pipeline, establish strong cross-functional ways of working.
- 6 months: Achieve uplifts in key funnel stages (e.g., traffic-to-curiosity, time-to-first-value); improve logged-in engagement; run a repeatable experimentation cadence with documented learnings.
- 12 months: Deliver sustained conversion and retention gains; embed intelligence in discovery/matching; demonstrate measurable enrolment impact; establish a well-operating horizontal growth practice
Key skills and experience:
- Proven ownership of activation, engagement, conversion, or post-intent journeys in digital products.
- Track record designing front-end experiences that drive curiosity, intent, and time-to-first-value.
- Deep understanding of logged-in experiences: identity, preferences, and personalisation.
- Hands-on experimentation mindset; fluent in A/B testing, cohort analysis, funnel metrics, instrumentation, and guardrail design.
- Experience with discovery, relevance, matching, or recommendation systems.
- Strong partnership with CRM/lifecycle platforms; aligning in-product signals with lifecycle touchpoints (without owning campaigns).
- Excellent cross-functional leadership and communication skills; comfortable influencing across complex organisations.
- Agile product delivery; ability to balance quick wins with strategic bets.
- Advantageous: SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, or edtech; B2C growth; SEO/organic acquisition; student recruitment journeys; technical fluency to engage with engineering.
- Working style aligned to QS: student-first and partner-aligned, outcomes over output, data-informed and privacy-conscious, global-by-design, collaborative and iterative
Please note, if you don't meet all the criteria but believe you have the skills and passion to thrive in this role, we encourage you to apply.
So, who are we and what do we do?
QS is the world leader in higher education services, analytics, insights and intelligence. From consultancy to student mobility, academic partnerships to branding solutions, our services power both institutional and individual success.
We’re behind the world’s most widely read university rankings (Meltwater 2023). Our QS World University Rankings® reach hundreds of millions, shaping decisions and guiding futures.
Since launching in 1990, our impact and influence have only grown. Today, we work with more than 2,000 of the world’s leading higher education institutions, over 12,000 employers, and governments seeking change and socioeconomic development through higher education.
Join QS and you’ll join an 800-strong community of problem-solvers, creators, collaborators and change-makers based in 40+ countries and 11
international offices, including Australia, Malaysia, India, Romania, Singapore, France, Germany, the USA and our headquarters in London.
With every talented new hire, business acquisition and bold initiative, we’re strengthening our reach and delivering even greater value to institutions and learners worldwide. Are you ready to shape the future of higher education?
We take investing in our people very seriously.
As standard you will have:
- Competitive base salary
- Access to an annual bonus scheme (for qualifying roles only)
- 25 days annual leave, plus bank holidays – increasing to 27 days after 5 years’
- Access to a Buy Holiday scheme allowing you to buy up to 5 additional holiday days per year
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
- Generous pension through Royal London
- Comprehensive private medical insurance and wellness scheme through Vitality
- Cycle to work scheme
- A vibrant social environment and multicultural and multinational culture
But that’s not all. Outside of these standard benefits we also offer resources to allow professional growth and wellness initiatives to nurture a healthy mindset:
- Free subscription to the Calm App – the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation
- A focus on welfare which is led by our global wellness team, with mental health first aiders globally
- Access to a variety of diversity and inclusion initiatives and groups
- Strong recognition and reward programs – including a peer-to-peer recognition platform, quarterly and annual QS Applaud Awards, Connect with your Career annual PD event
- Support for volunteering and study leave
- Free subscription to LinkedIn learning – with over 5000 courses and programmes at your fingertips
- Options to join our outstanding global Mentorship programme
Like what you’ve heard? Great, apply now!
As a candidate, we know the application and interview process can be daunting and so it’s important that you have a great experience with us. Our dedicated Talent Team will work hard to ensure you are fully informed at all stages and you are really excited by this opportunity to do meaningful work in the education space.
Equal opportunities
QS Quacquarelli Symonds is proud to be a fair and equal organisation where everyone has the same opportunity to achieve their full potential, irrespective of their background or personal attributes. We celebrate our diversity and believe through sharing our experiences we can learn from one another, be stronger together, and enable our business to thrive.
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