Product Manager, Core Experience

Job description

In just five years, Stora https://stora.co has become the platform behind more than 30% of UK self storage locations, and we're scaling globally from here. Operators have processed over £150m in automated payments through us, and see an average of 32% business growth after they switch. We're doing this in a market that's wide open. Europe has over 10,000 self storage sites and is growing fast, yet it sits years behind the US on maturity and is still barely touched by good software. The UK is our stronghold. The rest of Europe is where we're heading next. Stora is the operating system for modern self storage: online bookings, payments, facility management, reporting, and automation in one platform. We started as operators ourselves, and that's still how we think. If you want to own a product operators depend on every day, in a company genuinely rethinking how it builds, this is it. WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS We have a strong product team, great engineers, and a growing product. The bottleneck isn't ideas or execution capacity. It's people who can hold the full picture at once. What the business needs, what the customer actually experiences, what's technically feasible, what to cut when time is short, and knowing when to slow down. Making good calls across all of it. That's the job. We've shortened the loop between insight and shipped product by stripping out the layers that slow good judgement down. The quality bar didn't move. This role exists to keep doing that. It carries real ownership from day one, and the scope grows as Stora does. THE SURFACE YOU'D OWN This is the product operators live in every day, and the storefront their own customers book through. You're designing for two users at once: the operator running the business, and the end customer renting the unit. Getting that B2B2C experience right is a genuine craft problem. It's a broad, central surface, and it's heavy on UX. Concretely, the surface includes: - Core workflows: customers, units, tenancies, access - Roles, permissions, account structure - Operational reporting: occupancy, utilisation, activity - The internal data layer: event tracking, core models, metric definitions - The growth surface: storefront, checkout, the lead → booking funnel If an operator uses it daily, or relies on it to understand their business, it sits with this team. HOW WE ACTUALLY WORK We've changed how product gets built at Stora. This is how we operate now. Designers work directly in the codebase. Engineers and product people work closely together from the start. We use AI genuinely: to explore, prototype and move faster. The work gets closer to reality, sooner. If you're at a company that talks about moving faster but runs the same process it did three years ago, this will feel different. We're not done evolving how we work, and this person will have real scope to shape that. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own a problem space end-to-end, from understanding the customer need to something live in the product - Work across both sides of the experience: operator back office and end-customer storefront - Work directly with engineering leads. Close collaboration, not handoff - Make scope calls. Know what to cut, what's fundamental, what can wait - Work with or without a designer, depending on the problem. What matters is the outcome - Stay close to customers, talk to operators, understand how they run their businesses, bring that into every decision - Shape how we work. The process isn't fixed. If something's slowing things down, fix it WHAT YOU'LL BRING - Real product experience at a SaaS company. You've owned features or problem spaces end-to-end and shipped things people use. Roughly 2+ years, though we care more about the evidence than the number - A builder by instinct. You make things: side projects, tools, a company you tried to start. We'd rather see someone who ships than someone who only plans - A design or engineering past works too. You may have come from design, engineering, or somewhere else entirely. Designers and people who've started their own things tend to do well here - Great product taste. You can tell the difference between a solution that works and one that just ships - You define it yourself. You don't need everything defined to make progress - Real design sense. Strong enough to contribute or push back, which matters a lot on a surface this UX-heavy - AI-native. You use AI as a natural part of how you think and work. Not waiting to be shown how THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF - You need a detailed brief before you can start - You've only ever worked inside someone else's process and haven't shipped anything of your own - You think good product work stops before it ships - You go quiet when a problem is ambiguous instead of pushing into it WHY STORA - A category-defining surface to own. Self storage software is wide open, and the core experience is the heart of it. You set the direction here, you don't inherit it. - Work that ships, and that you feel. We've stripped out the layers between insight and shipped product. What you build reaches operators in weeks, not quarters. - A team that builds differently. Designers in the codebase, AI used for real, process that bends when it should. Small team, outsized impact. WHAT WE OFFER - Competitive salary - Share options - Remote across the UK & Europe, or hybrid from our Belfast office - 35 days holiday - Private health insurance (for you + family) - Company pension plan - Apple hardware - Learning & development support NEXT STEPS When you apply, we'll ask for a link to something you've made — a product, a side project, a repo, a tool you built because something annoyed you. It doesn't need to be polished, successful, or related to storage. We just want to see that you build. Please include one. We're reviewing applications as they come in and will be in touch quickly if it looks like a match.