Head of Product & Student Journey

Executive team role · Remote-first (UK) with some travel

The opportunity

UniQuest is the embedded enrolment partner to universities across the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Our teams and technology sit inside our partners' recruitment and admissions operations, engaging hundreds of thousands of students a year from first enquiry to enrolment. We are part of Keystone Education Group, one of the world's largest student marketing and recruitment businesses, and we are executing an ambitious strategy to 2030 – expanding into new markets, launching new products, and deepening what we do for the institutions we serve – always putting the student journey at the heart of ‘what good looks like’ and how we build our services.

We are creating a new executive role to lead this next phase. As Head of Product & Student Journey you will own the answer to the most valuable question in our sector: what actually works in the student journey – and you will turn that answer into the products, services and standards that our partners buy, our teams deliver, and the market follows. You will sit on the executive team, report directly to the CEO, and build the function from the ground up with a mandate that already has the leadership team's full backing.

Few product roles offer this combination: a genuine first-owner mandate at executive level; a proprietary data asset spanning millions of student interactions that the sector cannot replicate; a delivery organisation of 260 people across three global hubs to carry your decisions into practice; and a leadership team that has already committed to product-led growth as the centre of its strategy.

What you will own

• The definition of what good looks like in the student journey – across international and domestic recruitment, conversion and admissions – built on our data, external evidence and direct partner discovery, and published as the standards our services are delivered and sold against.
• The product and service roadmap: one prioritised view of what we build, improve and retire, decided with the executive team through a process you design and run. You inherit a live portfolio already in flight – spanning AI-enabled student engagement, partner-facing analytics and predictive models that guide recruitment decisions – and the authority to sequence it, accelerate it, or stop parts of it.
• The evidence engine: the benchmarks, journey analytics and value demonstration that prove impact to a variety of stakeholders at our partner institutions – and that position UniQuest as the sector's reference point for what works.
• The operating cadence that connects commercial, delivery and platform teams around your priorities.
• Your direct team: an insight analyst as your first hire, evolving as the roadmap demands.

What you will achieve in year one

In your first months you will take ownership of the in-flight product portfolio and bring it under one prioritised roadmap – with clear decisions on what ships, what accelerates and what stops – alongside publishing the priority questions our data must answer and an evidence-based map of the student journey across our core services. Within the year, the roadmap is running as the business's single prioritisation mechanism; products from the portfolio have shipped to partners with adoption and impact measured; your first benchmark and evidence publications are in front of partners and the market; service standards are adopted across delivery – and at least one thing has been deliberately stopped, product or practice, because the evidence said so.

Who you are

• A product leader with eight or more years in product management or service design, including meaningful time where the product is substantially a human-delivered tech-enabled service – B2C focusing on customer and conversion journeys, service-oriented businesses, or comparable.
• Evidence-led by instinct: you commission, interrogate and act on data, you know precisely what it can and cannot support, and you are at your best turning an imperfect dataset into a decision.
• A practised operator of prioritisation: you have run a roadmap that engineering, operations and commercial teams all worked from, and you can say no to senior people with a reason they respect.
• An exceptional communicator: this role leads through clarity and trust across functions you do not line-manage – and represents our thinking credibly to university senior leadership.
• Curious about higher education. Sector experience is welcome but not required; the ambition to become an authority in it is.

How to apply

Please send us your application by hitting the "Apply" button above. Along with your CV, include a short note - not a cover letter, just a few lines on a product or service decision you have made on evidence and what happened next.

Conversations are with the CEO from the first interview.

Keystone is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are deeply committed to fostering an inclusive environment for all employees.