Product Manager - AI & Agentic Solutions (For independent contractors)

At Booking.com, the CBO Office supports strategic and operational execution across the Chief Business Officer organisation, working across CBO departments and corporate functions. It brings together Business Operations, Change Management and Program Management to help the organisation prioritise, plan and govern major initiatives, enable business change and improve cross-functional delivery. The Product Manager will lead product discovery and strategy for an AI-powered, agentic delivery solution, working with stakeholders across Business Operations, Change Management and Program Management to identify common pain points, prioritise opportunities and translate them into a product vision, roadmap and clear requirements.

Today, we have a collection of AI use cases across the three disciplines. The ambition is to evolve these into a coherent product ecosystem, rather than a collection of disconnected solutions, identifying common capabilities that can be reused across workflows and progressively connected through agentic and multi-agent solutions. An important part of the discovery will be determining what should be shared, what needs to remain craft-specific, and whether this is best delivered as one product, multiple products, or a combination of shared and specialised capabilities.

We are looking for a Product Manager with experience developing GenAI/agentic enterprise products, ideally including multi-agent solutions, and taking them from discovery through experimentation, validation and adoption. The person should bring strong platform and product-system thinking and enough technical understanding of AI capabilities, limitations, evaluation, guardrails and human oversight to make effective product decisions. Experience with Project and Program Management workflows including planning, governance, risk management, reporting, knowledge management and stakeholder management is highly valuable.

The contractor will work closely with the programme lead, domain experts, users and technical teams to turn this vision into a scalable product that connects relevant enterprise knowledge and data and produces useful insights, recommendations, reports and reusable work products. A Senior Product Manager owns larger, more complex products/features or a portfolio of smaller features that are essential to the business in terms of continuity or strategic value.

A Senior Product Manager may lead multiple development teams and meaningfully influence the work of teams outside of their immediate control. A Senior Product manager regularly deals with situations with sizable organisational complexity, where aligning strategies and priorities across teams is critical. A Senior Product Manager is able to clearly understand, articulate and size user and product problems by using a wide range qualitative and quantitative insights.

These insights drive the long-term vision and strategy for a product/feature or portfolio of products that achieves significant impact. In an optimization-setting, this should mean achieving meaningful incremental performance of their products. In an NPD setting, SPM can get new complex products from 0-t1, resulting in either significant business impact or new data that leads to higher-level strategic business decisions.

Key Responsibilities: Product Strategy: owns and sets vision and strategy for a portfolio of products, or a significantly complex product/feature; lays out a 1-year strategy to achieve the vision, as part of their Track's strategy and aligns all key stakeholders including their team on this strategy; owns and defines objectives at Team and Track levels; contributes to overall Track strategy, driving the strategic framing of key initiatives; owns go-to-market plan and planning for their product; is a fluent spokesperson for their and the Track strategy and generates alignment across Track borders.

Product Delivery: manages long-term roadmaps with significantly larger complexity and scope (product, organisational and technical complexities) than more junior PMs, often with dependencies across multiple areas/teams; identifies risks and dependencies early on and plans for mitigations; works with the team to establish tactical delivery methodology (e.g. scrum, kanban, hours, points) and execute plans.

Data Fluency: identifies and explains the choice of the primary metric, supporting metric and counter metrics; understands what makes a solid hypothesis for experimentation; understands sample size, p-value and test power; understands how to analyse data and present findings to stakeholders and make product decisions with the results; defines (with analysts) best ways to present KPIs for tracking product success; has solid understanding of their data needs, when to partner with specialists and can analyse more complex data independently; deals with ambiguous and complex data where proxy metrics might be needed; understands and applies more sophisticated analytical or experimentation techniques (e.g. non-inferiority).

Customer Insight: is familiar with multiple techniques to better understand customer behaviour, such as interviews and surveys; knows how to gather customer needs and pain points and has experimented with techniques such as story mapping or use case design; understands the difference between different research methods and is familiar with the appropriate method for the problems they are solving; is familiar with research practices and principles and can use them in partnership with researchers to distil feedback into actionable hypotheses; analyses and distils customer feedback from a variety of sources into actionable hypotheses, uncovers unmet needs, validates or invalidates new concepts or improves existing products; is able to illustrate overall customer behaviour by blending multiple sources of product insights (such as surveys, field research, analytics, operations feedback); is familiar with user experience design practices and principles and can use them in partnership with designers to visualise a product problem to help guide their team's direction; crafts a set of prioritized business problem(s) and the corresponding research topics/areas of inquiry by applying understanding of business context, strategic needs of the group and the type and scope of customer engagement; develops the research brief in close collaboration with insights creators (such as research, data science, product marketing) - applying customer and product knowledge to tackle data gathering for complex topics or questions.

Stakeholder Management: identifies other teams and key stakeholders impacted by the current project; gathers stakeholders' key requirements and works with their manager to integrate the feedback; represents the work of the team in a convincing and engaging way; incorporates stakeholder requirements and feedback more independently before escalating; 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 Director level (occasionally LT); handles challenging stakeholders more independently.

Tech Fluency: partners with the Engineering Manager (Tech Lead); actively learns the technical side of their work; advocates for the customer and business in engineering tradeoff decisions; 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; builds bridges between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Community Impact: actively contributes to PM communities outside of their Track, for example by facilitating training, sharing broadly applicable learnings or contributing to Product craft Working Groups (e.g. Recruitment, Learning & Development, Promotions); interviewer for (S)PM roles in and outside of their Track; encouraged to be available for mentoring/coaching of more junior PMs.