Online marketing vacatures Utrecht

Respond to customer intent with mutually beneficial recommendations

How do you make our customers happy?

By helping them discover the products they need. Even when they didn’t know they needed them yet. As the Senior Product Manager for Team Recommendations, you define what ‘great’ recommendations are made of and lead a team of ambitious backend engineers, ML engineers, and data scientists in making every recommendation more relevant, personal, and fair. Each time you translate complex, ambiguous customer needs into precise, high‑performing recommendation experiences, you foster customer trust, conversion, and long‑term loyalty.

The biggest challenge

Understanding how to generate more value out of an already high‑performing algorithm. With endless opportunities to introduce new models, the real question becomes: how do you demonstrate impact quickly while investing in sustainable architectures? Recommendations transcend the realm of ‘simplistic’ algorithms. Success requires a deep understanding of user intent, context, and moments of need or inspiration. And turning that understanding into meaningful experiences at scale. When should a recommendation inspire versus drive immediate action? How do your algorithms adapt to different user mindsets in real time? How do you blend organic results with sponsored products in ways that feel helpful rather than intrusive? You’ll translate ambiguous questions into clear product outcomes while deftly navigating a raft of trade‑offs between relevance, latency, and cost.

What you'll do as Senior Product Manager – Recommendations

You’ll join Team Recommendations within the Consumer Engagement area, where you’ll lead product discovery and execution for AI‑powered recommendations. Your team enables other product teams rather than owning direct customer touch points, which makes stakeholder collaboration the key to your success. You’ll partner across bol to understand needs, advise on the optimal recommendation approach, and ensure your systems power meaningful customer experiences.

You’ll also advise teams on when speed, simplicity, or scalability should prevail and help them determine when to opt for fast experimentation using business rules, and when to invest in AI‑driven approaches to unlock long‑term value. This role demands a visionary yet pragmatic leader: someone who drives innovation while safeguarding stability and respecting the needs of the broader landscape. Summing up:

• Develop and execute the product vision for recommendations
• Lead product discovery by identifying, validating, and prioritizing customer problems
• Drive the adoption of advanced recommender systems and scale AI‑powered ranking that adapts in real time
• Co‑develop a strategy to integrate organic and sponsored recommendations, ensuring fair and valuable experiences
• Lead A/B testing and experimentation to continuously improve quality and satisfaction
• Collaborate with engineers, data scientists, analysts, and compliance experts
• Own the KPIs for relevance, engagement, conversion uplift, and coverage

Why you can make a difference

You combine proven product management experience with a deep understanding of AI‑driven recommendation systems, from candidate generation to ranking. You’re comfortable discussing vector embeddings, sequence modeling, contextual bandits, and multi‑objective optimization with engineers and data scientists, even if you don’t necessarily write code yourself.

You understand how recommendations work within a marketplace mechanism. You can navigate the tension between boosting short‑term GMV and long‑term customer retention, and you’ve built products that optimize for the sweet spot between them. Your strategic mindset translates ambiguous goals into actionable roadmaps. You’re skilled in stakeholder management and happily leverage data – including SQL‑based analysis and A/B testing – to inform every product decision.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you Pros

• High‑stakes optimizer Your decisions impact millions of queries per day; small ranking improvements are not trivial if they translate into massive gains in revenue and customer satisfaction
• Complexity embracer You'll tackle one of the toughest product challenges: using AI to deliver real‑time, personalized, fair recommendations that demonstrably drive business impact
• Pragmatic innovator You absolutely thrive in a team that values outcomes over output and balances experimentation with sustainable practices

Cons

• Eternally single This role demands collective ownership; if you don't believe in cross‑functional collaboration, you might get sidelined
• One‑track mind You deliver exceptional results as long as you don’t have to accommodate stakeholders. And then things fall apart.
• Instant gratification seeker Real impact in recommendations compounds over time. And you simply don’t have the patience for that.

Where you'll work

You’ll join Team Recommendations within the Consumer Engagement area of our Consumer Journey domain, home to all of our customer‑facing product teams. Your multidisciplinary team is experienced, curious, and highly ambitious. We experiment, seize opportunities, and make things happen collectively. With 2,900 colleagues serving 13.7 million customers through 46,500 partners, your decisions will shape how millions of people discover what they need.

You’ll collaborate closely with eCommerce, Advertising, Legal, and other product teams across several domains. We have a strong sense of ownership and a clear bias for action. We believe in entrepreneurship at every level: spotting opportunities, taking initiative, and working cross‑functionally to deliver real customer impact. Want to help us shape the future of eCommerce? We can sincerely recommend this position!

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