Director of Product, Merchandising & Trip Planning

Role Description

As Director of Product – Merchandising & Trip Planning, you will lead the Connected Trip Merchandising (CTM) and Trip Planning product organisation within Marketplace Product Experience, owning the 18 month direction for how Booking.com merchandises cross-sell recommendations, promotions and next-best-actions and helps travellers plan, shape and manage end-to-end trips — turning fragmented, surface-specific merchandising and a standalone planning experience into one shared, trip-aware decisioning and planning layer.

Operating at Product Director scope, you are responsible for multiple product groups (Home Screen, the Unified Merchandising System, Cross-sell, and the end-to-end Trip Planning experience), accountable for customer impact, business impact and Product Quality / Excellence, and a key player in Marketplace's Commercial Levers strategy. Trip Planning is the first strategic use case for the Unified Merchandising System and the natural home for trip-aware decisioning, which is why merchandising and trip planning are led together in this role.

Responsibilities

Product vision, strategy and outcomes

• Own the merchandising and trip planning strategy for Connected Trip and set a clear 18 month direction, translating company, Marketplace and Commercial Levers strategy into an aligned portfolio direction with sharp trade-offs.
• Define the strategic narrative and sequencing of major bets across Home Screen composition, the Unified Merchandising System, AI-driven recommendations, and the end-to-end Trip Planning experience.
• Own department-level outcomes and a measurable performance narrative using Connected Trip outcomes (incremental multi-vertical attach, recommendation engagement, trip-level success) and shared Commercial Levers economics (incrementality, iROI, contribution margin, CPiMVT), linked to financials and investment decisions.

Organisation leadership and delivery

• Lead the organisation across multiple product groups, driving 18 month planning and resource allocation while balancing short-term commercial delivery with long-term capability investments.
• Ensure delivery excellence and raise the bar on product quality — reliability, maintainability, compliance, cost efficiency, operational health, recommendation explainability and adherence to NFRs at scale.
• Lead the migration from fragmented, legacy rendering into the Unified Merchandising System, with Trip Planning as the first strategic use case, ensuring capabilities are operationally ready and duplicated logic is deprecated.

Cross-functional and cross-organisational collaboration

• Partner with Engineering leadership on multi-year architectural investment decisions shaping the Unified Merchandising System, the Recommendations stack and the Trip Object / Trip Platform within the broader Connected Trip platform.
• Connect merchandising and trip planning into the commercial operating model — partnering with incentives and AI/ML decisioning leaders, participating in the weekly trading rhythm, and contributing to cross-lever arbitration when levers compete for the same traveller, surface or moment.
• Lead complex cross-BU initiatives where merchandising and trip planning intersect with Search, the verticals, Genius / loyalty and platform teams, and represent the area in VP / SVP-level forums with clear options and decision requests.

People leadership and product craft

• Develop leaders, design and evolve the organisation structure (including integrating trip planning teams), and hire, coach and performance-manage senior PMs and GPMs for strong team and portfolio health.
• Lead as a true people manager with clear delegation and direct feedback, and contribute beyond core scope to Marketplace PX, Connected Trip and the wider PM craft.

Merchandising domain – specific responsibilities

• Own the Home Screen as the trip-aware first interaction point and “traffic controller”, directing travellers to Trip Planning, broad discovery or vertical funnels based on need and intent.
• Own the Unified Merchandising System as a single, AI-first, reusable capability that replaces fragmented rendering, and the Recommendations engine that operationalises “next best action” across non-search surfaces using the Trip Object and Traveller Intelligence as standard inputs.
• Make cross-sell recommendations trip-aware, explainable and consistent across surfaces, and integrate incentives and loyalty so Genius and MVT incentives surface through the same decisioning layer as one coherent value story.
• Establish shared merchandising principles, the recommendation feedback loop, and the experimentation and attribution approach so impact is measurable across surfaces without double-counting, partnering with Engineering, Data and ML on AI-enabled merchandising and GenAI dynamic content with human-in-the-loop guardrails.

Trip Planning domain – specific responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end “Plan a trip” experience across web and app, from inspiration through to booked itinerary and post-booking engagement.
• Shape the long-term strategy for intent-driven trip planning, making differentiated use of intent signals, AI/ML and personalisation, and define how trip planning integrates with search, recommendations, notifications and partner products.
• Own itinerary creation and management, cross-vertical trip packaging, and saved trips and inspiration surfaces, and set the strategy for representing multi-destination, multi-product trips and measuring trip-level success.

Ideal Experience & Skills

• Extensive product leadership experience (typically 10+ years), including several years leading multiple PM teams and managers at Product Director scope (multiple product groups, multi-year strategy, complex cross-BU initiatives) in a complex, global environment.
• A track record in merchandising, recommendations, personalisation, growth, journey orchestration or e-commerce / marketplace product at consumer scale, ideally where AI/ML-driven relevance and commercial outcomes were central, including ownership of end-to-end, intent-driven journeys and journey-level metrics.
• Strong commercial acumen and portfolio thinking: comfortable owning commercial outcomes and reasoning in terms of incrementality, iROI, contribution margin, CPiMVT, overlap and cannibalisation.
• Strong Applied AI Product Proficiency and Tech Fluency: able to evaluate product AI opportunities (recommendations, ranking, decisioning, GenAI content, conversational planning), govern responsible AI use, and partner on architecture and long-term technical health.
• Excellent stakeholder leadership and Strategic Thinking, able to influence senior leaders through structured narratives, options and clear decision framing. Strong command of English, written and spoken.
• Background in travel, marketplaces, consumer digital products, merchandising, recommendations, personalisation, trip planning or AI-enabled commercial product experiences, working at the intersection of traveller-facing experiences, platform capabilities, AI / ML systems and commercial decisioning.