About us: At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We’re the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you make. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the food you sample. Through our products, partners and people, we can empower everyone to experience the world.
Our brand new FinTech business unit – with teams in Amsterdam, Bangalore, London and Shanghai – develops new products and drives innovation to help us continue removing financial friction from the travel process. That makes buying and selling travel-related products and services simpler for both travelers and partners.
A Principal Product Manager is tasked with dealing with problems that rely on significant collaboration and alignment across not only tracks within departments, but often business units or businesses (e.g. between BKNG brands). A Principal Product Manager will often lead multiple teams, but will also be a single POC or lead a strategically important cross-departmental initiative. They own some of the most complex or ambiguous problems for the business, where risks and stakes are also often highest. A Principal Product Manager owns products/domains that drive the business forward in strategically important or novel ways. In an optimization-setting, impact will mean achieving meaningful business outcomes through their product or portfolio where their personal impact on their product’s success is evident. In an NPD setting this might mean creating a successful product strategy that leads to relevant and meaningful business outcomes or investments. PPMs are expected to be craft leaders and highly engaged in the product community, giving talks, mentoring and helping to shape our recruitment processes. PPMs are strong communicators, particularly of their specialist domains. A Principal Product Manager is not expected to be people managers. They are the pinnacle of individual contributor PM roles at Booking.com
Key Job Responsibilities and Duties
Lead product management for one of the Fintech Products track within the Booking.com FinTech organization:
- Coach and develop a diverse, inclusive and high-performing team of product managers;
- Be the cross-functional leader, and foster effective collaboration across teams and departments
Product Strategy:
- Translate business strategy into a Track strategy or a large program strategy, maintaining the right level of guidance and autonomy for teams to define specifics
- Own and define objectives at Track-level or Large program level
- Generate broad alignment on strategy within Department leadership and beyond, being spokesperson and leader for the Track
Product Delivery:
- Own the long-term roadmap for the Track or a large program
- Identify risks and dependencies early-on, and plan for mitigations
- Resolve dependencies and blockers across Track roadmaps and optimize deliverables across different teams/tracks/areas
- Define and run the processes that teams within the Track or Program need to execute efficiently
- Uses insights gathered from data to drive roadmap planning and quarterly goal setting for multiple products
Drive a Customer Centric Mindset across the track or Program:
- Is familiar with research practices and principles and can use them in partnership with researchers to distill feedback into actionable hypotheses
- Analyses and distills customer feedback from a variety of sources into actionable hypotheses, uncover unmet needs, validates or invalidates new concepts or improves existing products
Stakeholder Management:
- Identifies other teams and key stakeholders impacted by the current project.
- Proactively builds relationships and learns about the needs and plans of other areas across the business and understands how they might interact with their own area.
- Represents the overarching work of the track or program in a compelling and engaging way
- Manages stakeholder expectations with timely, concise and clear progress updates, adapted to stakeholder needs and via different mediums (verbal, written, presentation).
- Manages expectations up to VP level (occasionally LT)
- Coaches and mentors team to improve their stakeholder management
Tech Fluency:
- Partners with SEM and other senior tech leaders, actively learns the technical side of their work
- Understands what the most critical elements of the technical solution are and can explain and justify the chosen technical solutions
- Understands how the multiple systems used to deliver the product are interrelated and anticipates more complex problems or edge cases
- Ensures a high-quality user experience with our products by showing technical awareness and understanding of risks
- Ensures the technical feature development and strategy are scoped to satisfy the short and long term needs of the business
- Proactively reduces duplication in technical investments across the business.
- Ensures track holds high standards of product quality, stability and maintainability.
- Builds bridges between technical and non-technical stakeholders
Community Impact:
- Frequent interviewer for (S,G)PM roles outside of their Track.
- Encouraged to be a content creator and manager of learning content dedicated to their area of expertise
- Lead working groups in the Community focused on craft projects
- Encouraged to occasionally speak at external craft community events outside of Booking.com
- Available for mentoring/coaching of more junior PMs outside of their own track
Role Qualifications and Requirements
Fintech & Payments Subject Matter Expertise: Minimum 8–12 years of overall Product Management experience, with a significant portion dedicated to the Fintech or Financial Services sector
A track record of directly managing a team of product managers and/or shipping global, impactful software products in complex product landscapes
A technical background and familiarity with data structures
Ability to communicate effectively across all levels of the organization
Ability to lead cross-functional teams successfully
Minimum Years of Relevant Experience: 8 - 12 Years
Data Fluent:
- Can identify and explain the choice of the primary metric, supporting metric and counter metrics
- Understands what makes a solid hypothesis for experimentation
- Understands core experiment statistics e.g. sample size, p-value and test power
- Understands how to analyse data and present findings to stakeholders and make product decisions with the results
- Able to deal with ambiguous and complex data where proxy metrics might be needed.
- Understands and applies more sophisticated analytical or experimentation techniques (e.g. non-inferiority)
- Fully understands how their track’s performance connects with the wider business’s financial health and success
Benefits & Perks - Global Impact, Personal Relevance
Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, as well unique-to-Booking.com benefits which include:
- Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave
- Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country)
- Industry leading product discounts - up to 1400 per year - for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit
- Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide;
- Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture;
- Opportunity to utilize technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
- Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
- Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
- Need more flexibility in your work week? We are happy to consider part-time, and reduced working week opportunities* (min. 32 hours per week, subject to terms and conditions)
Inclusion at Booking.com:
Inclusion have been a core part of our company culture since day one. This ongoing journey starts with our very own employees, who represent over 140 nationalities and a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations.
Take it from our Chief People Officer, Paulo Pisano: “At Booking.com, the diversity of our people doesn’t just build an outstanding workplace, it also creates a better and more inclusive travel experience for everyone. Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do. It’s a place where you can make your mark and have a real impact in travel and tech.”
We ensure that colleagues with disabilities are provided the adjustments and tools they need to participate in the job application and interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.
Application Process:
- Let’s go places together: How we Hire
- This role does not come with relocation assistance
Pre-Employment Screening
If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.