Head of Product - Financial Services Core Products

Build the financial infrastructure that can scale bol’s financial services

Every order placed, every partner paid, every invoice processed - bol’s financial operations run on an infrastructure that has to perform reliably, at volume, and without fail. As the Head of Product for Financial Services Core Product, you own the product strategy for payments processing, the invoicing engine, financial integration with bookkeeping systems and VAT calculations. And all that while keeping the platform safe with adequate measures against fraud and CDD systems that facilitate effective screening and monitoring of customers and companies on our platform. With 100 million payments and 150 million invoices per year, the decisions you make will further solidify the trust that 14 million customers and 43,300 partners place in us to handle their every transaction on our platform.

How do you make our customers happy?

By ensuring bol’s financial infrastructure performs flawlessly at scale while continuously evolving to support the platform’s growth, reliability, compliance, and safety.

The biggest challenge

A financial infrastructure at bol’s scale and innovation speed means the systems you own are simultaneously mission-critical and constantly evolving. You can’t shut things down to refactor. New features and tweaks have to work as advertised. Every time. The engine is always running; 30 orders per second at peak, with zero tolerance for hiccups. The challenge is building a product organization that can drive meaningful platform advancement without compromising operational reliability. In this role you collaborate very closely with other financial service and license experts and stakeholders. Success requires strong collaborative and stakeholder management skills. You also need to be aware of what ‘being licensed’ means for Product and Tech departments, and to create the ‘compliance as a prerequisite’ culture.

What you will do

You report to the Domain Director of Product & Tech and lead a multi-product area with typically 3 to 6 product groups and 8-15 FTE in indirect scope. You operate in a highly cross-functional context - Product, Engineering, Data, Design, Commercial, and Operations all have stakes in the game - and lead a team of senior product leaders, including Group PMs and Senior PMs.

You set and drive a clear product vision and long-term strategy for the area, translate that into a coherent portfolio with actionable priorities, and own the investment decisions and resource allocation that turn this vision into reality. You establish KPI frameworks and experimentation practices that enable outcome-based decision-making across the product lifecycle. And you build your team’s product capability. After all, true product leadership isn’t ‘just’ about delivering the right outcomes today, but about developing the leaders who deliver them tomorrow.

In short:

• Define and own the area product strategy, ensuring alignment with company strategy and cross-Financial Services area dependencies
• Translate strategic ambitions into a coherent product portfolio with explicit prioritization across long-term strategic, commercial, and technical needs
• Lead and develop a team of senior product leaders with strong craft, clear accountability, and consistent execution
• Drive data-driven product development through KPI frameworks, experimentation, and analytics capabilities
• Own complex cross-domain problem-solving, expertly navigating trade-offs across business, technology, and customer needs
• Align senior stakeholders across Product, Technology, Commercial and the new legal entities with each other and the executive level on priorities and outcomes
• Shape cross-functional ways of working to enable efficient, end-to-end value delivery
• Contribute to company-wide standardized product and tech practices, in collaboration with the craft lead

Why you can make a difference

You have extensive product management leadership experience in complex, scaled, technology-driven environments with ties to Financial products. Senior engineers and commercial stakeholders want you in the room when hard trade-offs need to be made. You understand financial systems well enough to navigate the technical complexity beneath the surface. You also have a solid grasp on platform economics and can translate company goals into commercial direction. You’ve led leaders before and know the difference between managing a team and developing product leadership. You drive clarity in rapidly evolving, uncertain contexts, expertly balancing short-term delivery pressures with long-term strategic objectives. And you are confident enough to make high-impact decisions that involve trade-offs between customer value, business impact, and technical cost and feasibility.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

You are

• Platform thinker with operational depth: You see financial infrastructure as a product with its own strategy, not as ‘simply’ plumbing for the commercial layer.
• Leader of leaders: Your specialty is developing the people who execute while setting the strategic landscape.
• Clarity engine: Cross-domain dependencies, competing stakeholder priorities, systems that can never go down? You don’t wait for absolute certainty and consensus. You make the call, document your reasoning, and move on.

You are not

• Execution purist: You want to be close to the product, close to the team, and close to the sprint. All day, every minute of it.
• Consensus seeker: You need to make sure everyone is happy with a decision. And most of your tasks are on hold.
• Single-domain specialist: You’ve built deep expertise in a single financial product area and prefer to reside there indefinitely.

Where you'll be working

You’ll join bol’s Financial Services domain, responsible for the financial operations that power one of the largest retail tech platforms in the Netherlands and Belgium. Processing 100 million payments and 150 million invoices per year, protecting 14 million customers and 43,300 partners against fraud and financial risk, this is infrastructure that touches every corner of the platform. With 2,900 colleagues building for customers and partners who depend on us, the product decisions you make here have more reach than most product specialists ever dream of. The complexity is real. The mandate is clear. The floor is yours.

Perks of having a blue heart

• 29 days - to recharge
• Travel costs - Public transport, car, parking & charging covered
• Pension plan - 75% premium covered
• Annual bonus - Based on sustainability goals