Product Manager Data

Removing friction from the data engineering journey

The biggest challenge

Bol is changing retail to make daily life simpler for 13 million customers. Together with over 49,000 partners who do business on our retail tech platform, we offer 39 million articles and generate peak sales of 700 orders per minute (Black Friday, 2020).

Our company is data rich ánd hungry for data. All of our colleagues want to use data to take better decisions in order to make a positive impact for our customers. We have a self-service data architecture, where teams are (becoming) self-sufficient in their data needs.

In this context, the Data, Analytics & AI department is further developing bol’s Data Platform to bring it to the next level. We serve the entire bol.com organization, where every department or domain has its own (data) challenge. How do you facilitate data driven working in a decentralized set-up, with enthusiastic data engineers and data analysts that want to use state-of-the-art tools in a comfortable way, but also have to comply with rules & regulations? How do we enable (data) engineers to easily expose their data in a usable way? How do we get qualitative insights on the effectiveness of our product teams to the decision makers?

We are looking for a Product Manager Data Platform that is as enthusiastic about working with data and customer-focused as we are.

Where would you work?

As Product Manager Data Platform will work in the Data Platform team within the Data, Analytics & AI department. This group consists of three Product Teams: Data Analytics Platform, Data Engineering Platform and a new to be founded Portfolio Management team. The first focus for the Product Manager will be the Data Engineering Platform, and there is an opportunity to build the new Portfolio Management team from the ground up. Together with the Group Product Manager and one other Product Manager you will lead bol into the next chapter of working data driven – in a truly product-led way.

The Data Engineering Platform team currently consists of 3 Software Engineers. As bol’s Data Engineering Platform is evolving, so are we. We are creating the future Data Engineering Platform, in a product-led way. This means that we ease our customers’ life, who love to work with data, in the best way possible. The team works on providing our software engineers and analytics engineers with tooling to produce and publish high quality data for the entire company to use. We do this through tools for software engineers to stream data into our data lake and to validate the quality of this data. We also supply tools to analytics engineers to standardize and scale their work, making it easier to share and reuse data transformations and metrics, to automate pipelines and keep version control on changes to their data products. Our tech stack ranges from Kotlin applications to DBT/AirFlow, always having our BigQuery data lake at the center. We want to make a step up on our Data Engineering Platform. And that’s where you come in! How do we know if the tools we provide are what our customers need? What is our longer-term strategy for the Data Engineering Platform?

The Portfolio Management team is a team that needs to be build from the ground up. This team will be the accelerator of the Portfolio Management efforts, in which we need to create insights in the objective performance of all ~120 product teams; what are they working on, how do we manage dependencies, how do they contribute to the overall bol strategy, where are shifts in resources required, etc. Since this team is completely new, a short and long term product strategy needs to be defined, the right capabilities need to be hired and a successful team should be build. Together with the GPM you will be taking care of this challenge as well!

Your responsibilities as Product Manager Data Platform

• You lead product discovery efforts to understand the needs of the customers
• You enable your product team to be high performing and healthy team that delivers real value to bol.com
• You set the product strategy and roadmap and prioritize & maintain the product backlog
• You define your product key performance indicators, shape quarterly OKRs that balances short-term needs with progress on the product long-term vision
• You make sure success is measurable and celebrated
• You work collaboratively day to day with the engineering team to clarify business requirements, define clear success criteria, remove obstacles such as dependencies and cross-domain and cross-department alignments and define clear success criteria to deliver customer value
• You contribute to bol’s initiatives related to the Product Management craft, like standardizing job interviews, mentoring or other projects
• You collaborate closely with the leaders within Data, Analytics & AI and senior stakeholders to align and communicate the vision, strategy and roadmap of the products that is in line with the department’s vision

Why you can make a difference

Because you have experience as Product Manager for a data platform team, preferably in the field of data, you can lead by example. A track record as a data professional (analytics, data science, data engineer or Business Intelligence) or as a software engineer is required because of the complexity of the product and the ability to understand the environment and our customers.

Key Requirements for this role include

1. Experience:

· 3-7 years in Product Management focused on data platforms.

· 5+ years in data roles (e.g., data engineer, data analyst, or data scientist); experience as a software engineer is also relevant.

2. Technical Skills:

· Strong knowledge of data engineering and familiarity with tools like BigQuery, DBT, and Airflow.

3. Leadership & Collaboration:

· Proven ability to lead product discovery and enable high-performing teams.

· Excellent communication skills for aligning with stakeholders and engineering teams.

4. Strategic & Problem-Solving Skills:

· Experience in defining product strategy, maintaining backlogs, and setting OKRs.

· Ability to understand customer needs and navigate challenges in a decentralized environment.

5. Entrepreneurial Mindset:

· Flexible and adaptable to change, with a focus on building and shaping the role and team.

6. Regulatory Knowledge (Preferred):

· Familiarity with GDPR and data protection regulations.

· Willingness to learn about new data regulations and how to apply them

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

Why it may be something for you:

• You have the experience
• Yes, if you have 3 - 7 years of experience in Product Management and have experience with working with data or a platform product
• You love data
• Yes, if a tool stack (and usage data) with potentially over 3000 customers does not scare you
• You are a leader
• Yes, if you are a natural leader that’s sets a direction that others follow

Why it may not be something for you:

• You cannot handle stress
• No, if you don’t like a challenging and demanding environment
• You work solo
• No, if you already know how to solve all the problems without first talking to the customers
• You do not like change
• No, if you need to know which projects you’ll be working on for the next 6 months

This is where you will work

At one of the best known online retail tech platforms in The Netherlands and Belgium. A platform where roughly 13 million customers can choose from 39 million articles. A platform that helps about 49.000 commercial partners run their business. And a platform that will never be finished because bol. has been reinventing retail since 1999, and we will always be. If there is a better way to do something we are working on it!