Senior Product Manager - Flights OTA

About Wego Wego is the leading travel app and the largest online travel marketplace in the Middle East and North Africa. Our mission is to make travel better by helping millions of people discover, compare, and book flights, hotels, and travel experiences with confidence. Founded in 2005, Wego has grown from a metasearch engine into a full travel platform — combining powerful search with our own OTA products, where we don't just point travellers at a fare, we sell it, ticket it, and stand behind it when plans change. Millions of travellers use Wego every month across hundreds of airlines, hotels, and travel providers. That shift — from sending traffic to owning the transaction — is what this role exists for. Read this part before anything else Flights OTA experience is a hard requirement. Without it, please don't apply. We will not shortlist strong generalist PMs, strong marketplace PMs, or PMs whose travel experience is limited to metasearch, aggregation, or affiliate funnels. Not because those people aren't good — because this domain cannot be learned on the job at the speed we need, and we've stopped pretending otherwise. Here's the job at its best. A traveller flying Jeddah to Manila has her flight cancelled by the airline sixteen hours before departure. She's connecting through a hub, she has carry-on only, and she holds a passport that won't get her landside anywhere en route. The weak answer is "we'll refund you and you can rebook." The right answer takes about four seconds of expert reasoning: this is an involuntary cancellation, so the punitive change rules attached to her deep-discount fare don't apply — the ticket refunds in full, penalty-free. So refund it, re-shop the whole trip with her original budget restored, and rebuild her on two separate tickets through a different hub — having checked that the connection clears minimum connecting time, that both flights use the same terminal, and that she never has to re-clear immigration or re-check a bag, because she has neither the visa nor the luggage to survive a self-transfer. Send her two options. She's rebooked before she's finished processing the cancellation SMS. That one decision reaches across supply, shopping, booking, ticketing, refunds, and finance. It requires reading the fare rules correctly, knowing whether the airline filed a bespoke policy for that market — the one that arrived by email last Tuesday and lives in a Google Doc — pricing a live re-shop, issuing on a new PNR, refunding the old ticket, and leaving a money trail that reconciles. Every layer of it has a way to be quietly wrong: the GDS will cheerfully let you void a ticket the airline has forbidden you to void, and the debit memo turns up six months later with a penalty and an admin fee attached. Today perhaps a dozen people at Wego can reason through that end to end, and they're doing it by hand, one traveller at a time, while the other 99% of contact volume drowns them. We're building the system that does it at scale. That's the role. If you read that and were already thinking about MCT, terminal changes, and whether the involuntary rules genuinely apply to that fare — good. Role summary Own a Flights problem space end-to-end — not a screen, not a funnel stage. You'll take the traveller journey across shopping, booking, and post-booking and be accountable for how it performs commercially and how it behaves when reality intervenes: fares that move, tickets that fail, schedules that change, and travellers who need to cancel. The scope deliberately spans surfaces. Metasearch and comparison remain central to how travellers find us, but the interesting problems now sit in the seams — where a supplier switch at booking time creates a support contact three days later, where a baggage allowance we didn't parse at search time becomes a refund dispute, where the fare rule we couldn't read at purchase becomes a $700 agency debit memo six months on. This is an individual contributor role with real leverage. You'll lead cross-functional squads across Engineering, Design, Data Science, Supply, Commercial, Finance Ops, and Customer Support, and you'll be measured on outcomes — conversion, traffic quality, provider performance, cost-to-serve, retention — not on shipping velocity. What you'll actually work on These are live, funded programmes, not aspirations. The detail will shift; the shape won't. Here are some examples of problems you’ll need to solve. Zero Touch — self-service refunds and exchanges. Most of our contact-centre volume is travellers asking whether they can cancel or change, and most of them don't proceed once they see the cost. You'll make that answer instant, accurate, and self-serve — genuinely end to end, including back-office execution and finance reconciliation. A refund that looks automated to the traveller but spawns four manual touches behind the scenes hasn't been automated, it's been moved. You'll also design the hybrid cases, with a human in the loop. A booking record that reflects reality. You'll help define a store that traces a trip across its full lifecycle with every money movement attached, and that reconciles sources when they disagree — which they do, sometimes on the same booking, in ways that cost us real money. Untangling the money. Payment fees, markups, booking fees, supplier costs, penalties, and the residue of every reprice, currently spread across a dozen-plus spreadsheets and recurring arguments about which one is right. You'll work with Finance Ops on the mid-office layer that puts it all on one record — including the honest build-versus-buy call. The hard part: what makes automation here different Read this as a preview of your first quarter, not as a warning. 90% accurate is not a pass. In most products a heuristic that's right nine times out of ten is a win. Here, the 10% is a traveller told their ticket was refundable when it wasn't — so we either break a promise or eat the loss — or a void we shouldn't have processed, which returns as an airline debit six months later with a penalty attached. You'll have to reason about failure cost per decision, not aggregate accuracy. The truth is spread across systems that don't agree. There is no single row you can trust. Much of this work is deciding what the source of truth is before you can automate anything on top of it. Money moves before the answer is known. Funds have often already gone to the supplier by the time we decide what the traveller is owed. Product decisions here land directly on finance reconciliation, and you'll need to design with that in mind rather than hand it over. Complexity we're choosing to keep. Continuous reprice optimization is a significant profit stream. We are not turning it off to make servicing simpler. You'll be automating on top of a system that deliberately mutates bookings after sale. Some rules only exist in someone's head. A real part of this role is operational design: turning tacit knowledge held by a handful of people into something a system — or an AI agent — can act on. Key responsibilities Strategy and vision. Define and evolve the strategy for your Flights problem space, aligned to marketplace growth and commercial objectives. Identify where we can be structurally more competitive, and translate that into measurable outcomes. Roadmap and delivery. Own the roadmap and its sequencing, prioritising on customer value, business impact, technical feasibility, and dependency risk. Lead initiatives through discovery, validation, delivery, experimentation, launch, and optimisation. Balance near-term commercial wins against foundational platform investment — and be able to defend the trade-off. Experience quality. Champion a fast, intuitive, and above all truthful experience at every stage. Optimise relevance, price presentation, filtering, comparison, provider selection, fulfilment, and self-service. Validate with research, experimentation, and behavioural data. Data and performance. Partner with Data Science and Analytics on funnel health. Define and track KPIs across acquisition, engagement, conversion, retention, traffic quality, provider performance, cost-to-serve, and marketplace efficiency. Cross-functional leadership. Work across Engineering, Design, Supply, Commercial, Marketing, Revenue Management, Finance Ops, and Customer Support. Communicate priorities, decisions, and trade-offs clearly. Build alignment without direct authority. Market intelligence. Track airline distribution shifts, NDC adoption, competitor moves, and emerging technology — particularly AI applied to fare interpretation and servicing — and turn that into initiatives. Risk and operational excellence. Surface delivery, technical, commercial, and regulatory risk early. Improve experimentation frameworks and development process. Keep decisions consistent with platform stability and long-term maintainability. Who you are Required — non-negotiable

• 5+ years in Product Management, with direct ownership of customer-facing digital products.
• Meaningful experience as a PM in a Flights OTA — a business that sells and services flight tickets. Metasearch, aggregation, comparison, or affiliate-only experience does not substitute for this.
• Depth across more than one flights problem space. For example shopping and booking; booking and post-booking; supply and shopping. We want someone who has seen how decisions in one stage surface as cost or breakage in another.
• Working fluency in flight distribution mechanics. You should be comfortable, unprompted, with: PNRs versus tickets and why they diverge; fare rules, fare families and FBC logic; refunds versus exchanges, voluntary versus involuntary; EDIFACT and NDC behaviour across GDSs; LCC direct-connect realities; ancillaries and baggage; agency debit memos and settlement.
• Experience where product decisions touched money movement — pricing, fees, markups, refunds, chargebacks, or supplier reconciliation. You've had to explain your product decision to a finance team.
• Comfort with ambiguity in the data itself. You've shipped in environments where the systems disagreed and part of the job was deciding what to believe.
• Strong experimentation and analytics practice — you form hypotheses, size them, and change your mind on evidence.
• Demonstrated influence without authority across engineering, design, analytics, commercial, and operations.
• Clear, direct communication with technical and non-technical audiences, and the confidence to disagree upward with evidence.

Preferred

• Post-booking or servicing ownership: refunds, exchanges, schedule change, disruption, self-service.
• Experience automating operational workflows and measuring cost-to-serve, not just conversion.
• Exposure to mid-office, back-office, or reconciliation systems.
• Experience applying LLMs or AI agents to unstructured domain data in production — with a realistic view of where they break.
• MENA market exposure, or experience in a comparably fragmented multi-market environment. This is probably not the role for you if
• Your flights experience is metasearch or affiliate distribution only.
• You've owned a funnel stage but never the consequences of it downstream.
• You'd rather define the strategy than sit with Finance Ops working out why a supplier statement doesn't reconcile.
• You need the problem to be well-defined before you'll engage with it. Much of this isn't yet. How we'll assess this Expect the interview to be concrete. We'll walk through a real servicing scenario and ask how you'd sequence it. We'll show you an actual fare rule and ask you what it means. We'll ask about a time your product decision created a downstream operational cost, and what you did about it. We're not testing recall of jargon. We're testing whether you've lived in this problem and have opinions about it. Why this role is worth your time Very few flights teams get to rebuild shopping, booking, and post-booking at once, at real scale, at the exact moment the underlying technology has changed enough to make a fifty-year-old problem tractable. Fare rules have been an industry punchline for decades — people were calling them unsolvable when today's AI didn't exist. That's no longer true, and we intend to be early rather than late. Behind every search, booking, and trip is a team that would rather fix the hard layer than paper over it. If that's the work you want, we'd like to talk.