Product at Utility Warehouse | Just the right mix

We keep saying it but UW is truly unique, whether it's the fact we’re the only multi-service utility provider in the UK or our unique route to market, we’ve always believed in doing things our own way and not following the crowd. Innovation is at the heart of what we do, we’re always looking at ways to bring our customers to life and ensure we continue to meet their needs. 

As a company focussed on delivery, we look for people who understand the value of iterative improvements, that strategy is nothing without execution and those that are happy to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. With a number of key hires to make in the coming months I thought I’d talk about product here at UW and how we see things. 

The responsibilities of a product manager are to know enough about each area to the point where you can do your job effectively, which is ultimately delivering products that fuel growth and increase profitability. It's the product managers role to bring together a cross-functional team of sales, data, marketing, UX and engineering together towards the same goal. 

We hire people who have a proven background of success and impact, who value business outcomes over feature development and perhaps most importantly have launched successful products and for good reason. 

Our environment is not conducive to a cookie cutter, one size fits all approach, just because things worked that way where you worked last, doesn’t mean that is a silver bullet solution. We need people who can make the complex simple, that enjoy looking at things from a different angle, confident in their own abilities. Our product managers understand this and embrace the freedom to bring some creativity to their role along with the responsibility. 

We’re looking to ramp up our existing products and launch new ones, we’ve scaled our technology team significantly over the past 3 years to support our plans and now we’re looking for the missing pieces that will help us put this all together. With so much still yet to do on our journey there is an abundance of opportunities internally to make a difference and create impact. 

Below is a breakdown of the current opportunities across product here at UW. You can also find more info at https://uw.engineering

Insurance:

We operate differently: we avoid price hikes at renewal, don’t charge policy adjustment fees and there is no charge (0% APR) when paying monthly. We’ve now sold 25,000 policies, are seeing industry-topping 95%+ renewal rates and our growth is rapidly accelerating. We’ve been listening to our customers and we’re confident that our fresh approach will enable us to bring additional innovative products to market and optimise our existing supply chain to ensure we can continue to delight our customers whilst delivering sustainable P&L contribution. 

Come and take responsibility for our insurance product delivery as we grow this exciting business. This means owning the product strategy and backlog for the Insurance team, defining the outcomes we’re trying to achieve alongside owning, measuring and sharing key product metrics, impacts and learnings. 

Partner:

An exciting opportunity to help drive growth of the UW business and improve the Partner experience through innovation, optimisation and gamification. Add exceptional value through user research, uncovering pain points and revealing what stimulates activity throughout UW’s remarkable network of independent distributors.

We don't sell directly to customers but have a network of partners around the country who champion UW and our services. Switching all your utilities to a single new supplier in one go can appear challenging, which is why our Partners guide new customers through the set up process to guarantee a smooth on-boarding experience. Key to growing their business is the day-to-day activity of networking and building relationships. Partners meet people from different walks of life to gather leads, pick up referrals from existing UW customers, or host events in order to build their sales pipeline.

We want to make it as easy as possible for all our Partners to be successful. As they come from a variety of backgrounds and with varying degrees of technical understanding, we’re aiming to create simple tools for our Partners which make managing their business and recommending our services effortless for all. We’re investing a lot in data and tooling to build and increase our understanding of partners and their behaviour, so we can focus on the right improvements in the right areas.

Customer - Multi-service 

UW represents a lot of different products and services that we need to make sure we’re bringing together consistently, into a single, clear customer proposition. We currently offer hundreds of variations of product options which can be confusing to customers and hard to support. Following ongoing investment in data and tooling, we’re working alongside UX research to make sure our core proposition is simple and appeals primarily to our target customers in the best possible way, but without completely ignoring others.

The aim is to create a seamless end-to-end customer experience that fulfils our ambition to bring all household bills together into one place and make it super simple. This is a new team that will have around four engineers, plus UX and design support within, alongside a Product Marketing Manager. This is a complete overhaul that includes owning the product strategy for our multi-service proposition, defining and implementing the rules that govern how our products and services should interact and driving innovation, connecting the dots to ensure that the brand lives up to its promise, and is expressed coherently through multiple touch-points.

You’ll love working with us if you are an effective communicator who has a passion for understanding real people’s real problems, and developing ideas and solutions based on real insight. We are an energetic and collaborative group always willing to get stuck in and get involved in hands on delivery. We’re offering a consumer facing, highly visible, delivery-focused and fast paced environment surrounded by people that are motivated and ambitious. If this sounds like the type of environment you would thrive in why not get in touch with the team here and see where you fit in?