Technical Product Owner

Who is UJV?

Planning and managing a 5-star vacation from scratch requires expertise, cleverness, and a genuine passion for detail. That's what UJV is all about. UJV is a service-driven team of experts that work behind the scenes, engineering luxury travel experiences for advisors globally, so they can grow their business and fully satisfy their exclusive clients.

We are the luxury travel advisor’s right hand. How?

• UJV is a team of travel experts that advises and supports luxury travel advisors worldwide.

• We work behind the scenes as allies of top luxury travel advisors, to offer a 5 Star experience for their clients.

• We offer travel advisors the knowledge and tools needed to grow their business and better serve their exclusive clients.

• We offer an experience-centered service based on passion, expertise, integrity

• and attention to detail.

• We are willing to do the hard work in order to see our clients shine.

Role Mission

The Technical Product Owner leads the strategy and delivery of UJV's e-commerce platform: the B2B, B2C, client, advisor, partner, and white-label online booking portals, and the API integrations behind them. Together, these products shape how UJV does business with clients, advisors, partners, and vendors. You will sit at the intersection of users, business, and technology: understanding what each audience needs, deciding what is worth building, and working with engineering to bring it to life.

As product owner, you will define the vision and roadmap, prioritize with a clear view of impact and effort, and measure success through adoption and business results. You will work hands-on, using customer research, data, and AI-enabled tools to test ideas early and make confident decisions. This is a high-visibility role for someone who enjoys real ownership, thrives in a small and fast-moving team, and wants to build the technology behind a leading luxury travel brand.

You will also serve as UJV's product practice lead. Several leaders across reservations operations, the Admin platform, and supplier inventory (the Product Vault) own products without the PM title, and part of your role is to make them stronger at scoping, prioritizing, writing requirements, and measuring adoption. You lead by example and by coaching, not by authority.

Responsibilities

Product Ownership and Roadmap

• Own the roadmap, backlog, and prioritization for UJV's e-commerce platform (B2B, B2C, client, advisor, partner, and white-label online booking portals, including API integrations), turning business goals into multi-quarter roadmaps and quarterly goals.

• Act as the single point of product ownership: the one person engineering, operations, and leadership go to for product decisions.

• Lock requirements and acceptance criteria before each sprint, and manage change through the roadmap rather than mid-cycle.

• Decide what will not be built this sprint or quarter, protecting a coherent experience for advisors, hotels, partners, and clients.

Discovery and Prototyping

• Stay close to the user's pain points: run discovery directly with advisors and hotel partners, including time embedded with hotel operations.

• Build working prototypes and applications with AI tools (such as Lovable, Cursor, or Claude) to validate workflows before engineering commits.

• Translate user pain points into clear technical requirements, with cost, impact, and effort made explicit for each.

Adoption, Analytics, and Observability

• Own adoption, not just delivery: drive advisor activation, search-to-booking conversion, and bookings.

• Define and instrument product analytics from day one, including activation funnels, conversion, performance, and failure points, and report on them in the weekly leadership meeting.

• Set non-functional acceptance criteria with engineering, including performance on production-scale data.

Cross-Team Partnership

• Direct the Portal engineering team and any external build partners on product priorities, acting as the bridge so engineers do not have to field raw user requests.

• Sequence which inventory and verticals (hotels, services, packaging, and beyond) reach the Portal together with the Product Vault owner, and coordinate shared trip-building logic with the Admin product owner.

• Partner with Hotel Partnerships on hotel relationships, reporting, and co-op marketing; with Marketing on the public site and landing pages; and with Data on reporting.

• Work with the Tech Lead to design and embed AI assistants and agentic workflows into the portals.

Backlog and Prioritization

• Own the Jira backlog for the portals end to end: intake, triage, prioritization, ticket quality, and sprint readiness. A ticket without a clear problem statement, acceptance criteria, and test cases does not enter the sprint.

• Run one prioritization system across Jira (engineering execution, bugs, QC) and Asana (business requests, cross-department projects, quarterly rocks), so every request has one home, one owner, and one priority. If you bring better tickets or want to build one, we are open to explore buy vs build.

• Run weekly backlog grooming with engineering leads and external build partners, and publish what moved up, what moved down, and what was cut, with the reason.

• Trace every ticket to a quarterly rock or roadmap item, and challenge work that cannot be traced.

• Keep Jira and Asana data clean enough to feed the leadership scorecard: sprint completion, bug pipeline, and cycle time.

• Protect the quarter from scope creep: split mid-cycle requirements into phases and make the tradeoff explicit to stakeholders.

Raising the Bar Across the Teams

• Coach the operations and platform leaders who carry product responsibility: turn ideas into scoped, phased requirements, and quarterly rocks into measurable milestones that are clearly on or off track.

• Build and roll out a lightweight UJV product playbook: problem brief and requirements template, acceptance criteria standards, a shared prioritization framework (impact, effort, confidence), and a release and adoption checklist.

• Teach AI product craft: prototyping with AI tools inside our shared setup, and designing evals (accuracy, guardrails, business impact) before AI output is trusted in production.

• Run regular product reviews or office hours where any leader can bring an idea and leave with a scoped, prioritized next step.

• Measure your impact by the team's output: fewer tickets bounced back for clarification, less rework, and more rocks landing on scope.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management, with at least 3 years owning a transactional e-commerce or two-sided marketplace product: search-to-purchase funnels, checkout and booking flows, supply onboarding, and conversion. Travel experience is a plus, not a substitute.

• Proven experience running both discovery (new products) and delivery (existing products and teams).

• Hands-on AI fluency: you prototype with tools such as Lovable, Cursor, or Claude and use AI daily for research and documentation.

• Strong analytical skills: product analytics, SQL, and event instrumentation for funnels and conversion.

• Working API literacy to write specs against booking and inventory APIs, plus comfort with Jira, Asana, or Linear and Figma.

• Sound product judgment, an ownership mindset, and rigor at speed: you can say no, act without perfect requirements, and keep a high bar before anything ships.

• Track record of making the people around you better at product work, with or without direct reports, such as introducing a prioritization framework, coaching non-PMs on requirements, or building a playbook a team actually adopted.

• Experience designing AI-assisted search or conversational experiences.

• Near-native English proficiency.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience in travel, hospitality, or travel tech (OTAs, wholesale, advisor or hotel tech), or in e-commerce and marketplace products.

• Experience with advertising or sponsored placements in a marketplace, or selling to and validating with B2B partners such as hotels.