Product Owner

About Polarsteps

We're an Amsterdam-based team of 23 (and counting) with 10+ nationalities amongst us – a varied bunch of “Citizens of The World” with a range of cool skills and hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our travel belts. We also have something important in common (other than our very well-worn passports): We want to change the way people travel.

And that's exactly what we're doing, with the travel app to plan, track, and remember trips in a smart and beautiful way. Polarsteps has over 3 million users already, but, for us, this is just the start. You see, there are amazing new features on our roadmap, and we need even more talented & ambitious people to help us on our journey.

Position

We're looking for an experienced Product Owner for Polarsteps Guides: the destination guides that form the beating heart of our app's planning and inspiration features. Polarsteps Guides are a collection of the world’s best travel destinations and insider tips — putting the most exciting, glorious, weird, interesting, quirky, adrenaline-filled places and experiences into travelers' hands (and pockets). Tips are created by our adventure-loving editors, as well as including recommendations from our worldly Polarsteps users. As we've only just begun our journey to become a global travel inspiration source, launching with 60 free destination Guides in July 2021, you'll have the opportunity to build and improve this ambitious new feature with us and help shape the future of travel planning!

Product at Polarsteps

Working as Product Owner at Polarsteps, you'll find that no two weeks will be the same. One day you'll be working closely together with our two designers Job and Yannis and our product manager Willem, creating concepts and specifying new features for our development team to work on, and another you'll be helping our development team implement these features in our iOS, Android and web products. One thing is a constant: our whole team is involved in our demos, from our editorial team to community & support, with the company cheering everyone on as we work towards becoming an even better travel app every day (and of course always taking the time to enjoy a cold drink together at the end of it).

Your role

• You'll be the domain expert on the topic of travel inspiration. You'll have a deep understanding of our product, the travel market and most importantly our users, by asking them the right questions, measuring and analyzing data and always striving to learn from your expert peers
• You'll prioritize the features that have real impact over the stuff that doesn't matter as much, using your intuition and experience while always validating your own assumptions
• Translating big and complex topics into small and testable stories, you'll strive to make tasks and the outcome comprehensible for everyone you're working with
• You'll work to make the roadmap a success, creating it collaboratively with the leadership team and the editorial team
• You'll conceive and define features in collaboration with our design team 
• You'll own the Scrum process by facilitating retrospectives, reviews, demos, and daily standup meetings, and making sure that work is properly refined before going into a planning session

Your qualification

• Having 5+ years experience as a Product Manager or Product Owner for a technology or media company, preferably at a fast-growing scale-up
• Being a passionate traveler with an innate curiosity about the world
• Having experience working with multi-disciplinary teams and empathizing with people with different personalities
• Having a track record of building meaningful mobile consumer apps

What we offer

• Travel, family time, relaxing in your garden – whatever you need to recharge your batteries – you'll have 28 days of vacay for all your adventures & desires
• We love to spend time together – whether it is during our daily team lunch, Friday drinks (aka Pollo Pollo's) or our legendary road trips & outings – team Polarsteps is a happy lot that is always up for an adventure 
• Love biking? Or do you prefer public transport? Either way, our office in downtown Amsterdam is easy to get to, and we will cover your travel costs!
• The second best thing about an unforgettable journey is the memories of it. That's why you'll have the opportunity to get all your travel memories in the form of beautiful Travel Books – for free :)
• Oh, and yes, that free flight to a random location you've heard about? It's true. Try it out and give our Teleporter a spin here