Senior Director of Product - ABU Core, Pricing & Supply

About Booking.com

Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings’ total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $119,69 billion (2023). Booking.com currently employs approximately 13,000 employees in 140 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 44 languages, offer more than 28M total reported listings, and cover over 174,000 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Offering 30 different types of places to stay, including homes, apartments, B&Bs, hostels, farm stays, bungalows, even boats, igloos, and treehouses. So whether travelling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal accommodation quickly and easily, without booking fees and backed up by its promise to price match. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 44 languages, any time of the day or night. 

At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation. 

When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what “good” looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.

• Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world
• Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.
• Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn – from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.
• Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.
• Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.

About Accommodations Business Unit

The Accommodations Business Unit (ABU) is at the heart of Booking.com, responsible for our offering of hotels, apartments, and other places to stay. We operate a two-sided marketplace: on the traveller side we deliver a conversion funnel that enables travelers to search, match and select their property, room and extras. On the partner side, we operate multiple platforms that enable our accommodations partners to do business with us including our web portal (extranet), app (Pulse) and connectivity APIs.

About the position of Senior Director of Product - ABU Core, Pricing & Supply

You will be responsible for managing and optimizing the following areas within of the Accommodations product portfolio:

• Our partner-facing commercial performance products including rate-plans, discounts, preferred, and Genius as well as our suite of availability products - ensuring we get both great prices and great availability from our partners 
• Our in-house discounting products including BSB, including being responsible for the commercial performance (volume, ROI) of this program
• Our core supply platforms (Extranet, Pulse, and our connectivity APIs)
• Tools used by our Partner Services organisation that enable us to go to market with our product offering, provide advice to partners, and manage those relationships

You will work in both the traveller and partner funnels, but with a particular focus on the partner, ensuring that our product offering & value proposition is compelling & attractive to  both large and small partners will have a positive impactful on our platform. You will build long-term strategies for how we improve our value proposition over time as well as delivering incremental impact quarter to quarter.

You will be relentlessly data-driven, and you must be highly commercially aware, especially as you will be directly accountable for a significant $ value of discounting spend via BSB. You must be adaptable to current market trends and able to adjust performance to hit our budgets and ROI targets.

You will collaborate extremely closely with your engineering SD counterpart, as well as the other Senior Director of Product in Core, and your product colleagues within the Segments organisation. You will need to manage multiple relationships with colleagues across the Partner Services organisation to ensure our product offering is compelling, can successfully be brought to market by our PS organisation, and is aligned with our overall goals as ABU and the goals of the PS organisation.

You will manage a team of 40-50 Product Managers. You will develop high performing teams, talents and culture that will help scale, adapt and innovate how we deliver growth and profit to Booking.com - both within your own area of responsibility and through proactive collaboration with every other part of Booking.com where opportunities exist. You will proactively remove barriers to help your team thrive and deliver a best-in-class experience to our customers.

You ensure that we build high quality, scalable products in a scalable way, ensuring that we make use of the most appropriate modern technologies, and you will navigate modernisation where this is required, balancing between delivering business impact and improving our systems over time.

You will report directly to the VP Product, Core Accommodations.

Key Responsibilities:

• End to end responsibility for products across multiple devices and channels;
• Responsibility for setting and meeting stretching commercial outcomes;
• Encourage a deep focus and understanding of the needs of our customers, and develop and validate innovative solutions;
• Set the product vision and agenda for product teams, and together with engineering be accountable for delivery against milestones and roadmaps. You build an ambitious vision for multi-product sales across the whole organisation;
• Foster the passion for developing and delivering products that engage and delight our customers;
• Help define the core KPIs for each product and the department as a whole, and lead the teams to deliver against those goals;
• Instill a culture of speed and quality in our product development practices and methods;
• Collaborate closely with technology management and leadership to ensure alignment in strategy, collaboration in execution and overall effective use of development resources, including impact and ROI;
• Challenge, clarify and sign off on investment requests and decisions; responsible for triggering team repurposing discussions and decisions;
• Collaborate with the rest of the leadership team to ensure strong alignment around product validation and go-to-market efforts;
• Contribute to the strategic direction of the company;
• Contribute to the growth of Booking.com through interviewing, onboarding, or other recruitment efforts;
• Empower people to do their best work at Booking.com;
• Actively contribute to driving product management as a function across the company.

Ideal Experience & Skills:

• 15+ years of Product Leadership Experience either with high traffic (100,000+ visitors per day) or significant experience with platform businesses;
• A minimum of 12 years of experience managing and coaching teams, including product directors, senior product managers/product owners;
• Track record of leading product departments (vision and KPIs/objectives setting, ideation and implementation process, team alignment with business goals);
• Proven experience working with multiple senior stakeholders (finance, budgeting, team management, recruitment, external customers);
• Comfortable with engaging with C-level executives from distribution partners and customers;
• Decisions in this role are not only about what we build, but very much about how we speed up our execution. Experience withBuy/Build/Partner decisions is necessary;
• Strategic thinker, able to balance long-term vision with short- and medium-term goals;
• Passion for solving problems creatively, starting small, failing fast, and applying the learning;
• Willingness to roll up sleeves and get things done.