Director - Product Management

Staples is business to business. You're what binds us together.Our eCommerce team delivers customer-centric site experiences to position Staples as a digital selling platform of choice. Our team ensures that our mobile, desktop, and app platforms deliver the digital experience that our customers expect. We do this through customer insights, analytics, and testing to build a strong innovation pipeline for the future and to bring products and solutions to market seamlessly. We utilize online merchandising and campaigns executed by both humans and automated tools to convert new and returning website visitors into customers. We work end-to-end with our sales, merchandising, finance, logistics, marketing, and technology teams to provide a world-class, holistic digital experience, growing profitable results in a fun and rewarding work environment. We are inclusive, customer-obsessed, and are looking for well-rounded professionals with strong eCommerce business acumen to join our team.The Director of Product Management, Conversational Search is a pivotal role that drives the innovation and development of our digital product offerings. This individual will lead the strategic direction, design, and implementation of digital products, ensuring alignment with our overall business strategy to enhance user experience and market competitiveness. This role requires a mix of strategic, technical, user-experience, and AI/ML specific skills.What you'll be doing: - Develop and implement a comprehensive digital product strategy. - Oversee the design, development, and management of digital products. - Build a comprehensive product roadmap that addresses customer needs and pain points. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure product-market fit and alignment with company objectives. - Lead the digital product team, setting clear goals, managing project loads, and ensuring timely delivery of product initiatives. What you bring to the table: - Intellectually Curious and Continuous Learner - desire to learn more and find the answers to deeper questions; think of exploring and learning as fun; eager and seeks out new challenges; humble when exploring the new. - Communicator and Influencer - effective at communicating the product vision to associates and partners; open to different communications styles and listens to diverse ideas; able to influence executives; comfortable with ambiguity. - Trusted Collaborator and Team Player - build deep and trusted relationships; work together in service of shared strategic priorities; partner with diverse people while driving towards common goal; willing to teach those around you. - Customer Centric and Passionate - demands the customer is the focal point of all decisions; bias towards action to make things better for the customer; driven to excel and deliver results consistently. - Proven experience in digital product management and strategic planning. - Demonstrated leadership in managing comprehensive digital product strategies. - Able to translate business strategy and analysis into consumer facing digital products.What's needed- Basic Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree in Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Information Technology, or related field or equivalent work experience. - A minimum of 10 years' experience in product management, with a significant portion dedicated to the realm of Conversational Search. This experience should include leading strategic projects to continue the advancement of search capabilities, from conception through to execution, demonstrating a capacity to innovate and drive significant change within an organization. - Driving RFP selection process for vendor partnerships. - 3 to 5 years focused on NLP, AI, or search-related products.- Proven success owning product roadmaps and launching iterative, high-impact features. - Strong focus on user engagement metrics and data-informed decision-making.- Minimum of 7 years in a leadership role within a digital product environment. - Proven experience in digital product management and strategic planning. - Demonstrated leadership in managing comprehensive digital product strategies. - Able to translate business strategy and analysis into consumer facing digital products. What's needed- Preferred Qualifications: - Advanced degree (MBA or equivalent). - Conversational AI & Search Experience - Deep understanding of LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, intent classification, and dialog systems - Experience with tools like OpenAI, Anthropic, Pinecone, LangChain, Elastic, or Solr - Skilled in prompt design, multi-turn dialog flows, fallback logic, and relevance ranking - 8 years in agile product management. - Experience in a global or multi-regional context. (ref:iimjobs.com)