Customer Centricity Product Lead (For independent contractors)

Central Technology (Central Tech)

Booking.com’s Central Technology (Central Tech) powers the company’s platforms, data, security, and internal tooling, enabling teams to deliver the Connected Trip. Its mission is to strengthen foundational technology, embed AI, and drive consistent, secure, and efficient engineering so that product teams can move faster and deliver excellent traveler and partner experiences.

What Central Tech Does

• Builds and operates core platforms, developer tooling, and cloud infrastructure for engineering at scale.

  
  

• Provides data and machine learning foundations and platforms to unlock AI and insights across the company.

  
  

• Safeguards the business with security, fraud prevention, and operational resilience capabilities.

  
  

• Runs enterprise IT services and collaboration tools to enhance employee productivity.

  
  

• Sets enterprise technology standards, architecture, and program governance to ensure consistency and reliability.

The Customer Led Tech program in Central Tech is a multi-year initiative designed to evolve Central Tech into a unified, customer-centric organization recognized as a valuable business partner. This initiative aims to improve communication and collaboration between Central Tech and the Booking.com Business Units and enhance the customer-centric mindset and ways of working within our Product and Engineering teams.

As the Customer Centricity Product Lead for the Customer Led Tech Initiative, you will work closely with the Central Tech teams to evolve our ways of working, placing the needs of our internal customers at the center of everything we do and deliver.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Support the definition and implementation of the strategy to improve Customer Centricity across Central Tech’s Product and Engineering teams. Our ambition is to help our teams to:

  
  

• Embed customer needs and feedback into the product lifecycle.

  
  

• Identify when change management is necessary when launching or modifying a product/process and support the implementation of the different change management stages.

  
  

• Proactively plan for changes that will impact our internal customers and prepare communications to ensure they are ready for those changes.

  
  

• Improve the communication process with our internal customers by defining and executing a strategy to bridge the gap between the current limitations of existing tools and processes and the needs of our teams and customers.

  
  

• Become a trusted product referent across the Central Tech product and engineering teams, able to influence them without formal authority.

  
  

• Support the overall product execution of the Customer Led Tech Initiative, the program this role is part of.

  
  

• Communicate recommendations supported by a compelling storyline to key stakeholders to ensure impact, build consensus among cross-functional teams, and influence decision-making with senior-level audiences.

  
  

• Communicate and influence senior stakeholders across the business.

B.Skilled

Core Product & Strategy Skills

• Product Strategy & Vision: The ability to define a clear vision and strategy for complex, cross-departmental initiatives (like the Customer Led Tech program) and secure broad alignment across the business.

  
  

• Customer Centricity Expertise: A proven ability to successfully define and implement strategies that embed customer needs and feedback into the product lifecycle.

  
  

• Product Execution & Delivery: Skill in managing long-term, highly complex roadmaps, identifying risks and dependencies, and driving critical decision-making with challenging trade-offs across multiple teams and business units.

Influence & Stakeholder Management

• Senior Stakeholder Communication & Influence: Exceptional ability to communicate with and influence senior leadership (up to VP/LT level) across the organization, providing concise and clear updates on strategic initiatives.

  
  

• Influence Without Authority: The skill to act as a trusted product referent and successfully guide and influence Central Tech’s Product and Engineering teams without a formal reporting line.

  
  

• Consensus Building: Proficiency in communicating complex recommendations through compelling narratives to key stakeholders, ensuring impact and building consensus among diverse, cross-functional teams.

Communication & Change Leadership

• Strategic Communication: The capacity to define and execute strategies to improve communication processes, addressing gaps in existing tools and ensuring internal customer needs are met.

  
  

• Change Management: Experience in identifying the need for, and supporting the implementation of, formal change management stages, including proactively planning for and communicating changes that impact internal customers.

  
  

Data & Insight Fluency

• Customer Insight & Research: Skill in analyzing and synthesizing customer feedback from a variety of sources to distill actionable hypotheses, uncover unmet needs, and tell a compelling story about the causal factors that drive product success.

  
  

• Data-Informed Decision Making: A strong understanding of core experimentation, metrics (KPIs, counter metrics), and the ability to work with ambiguous or complex data to inform product decisions and guide multiple teams on data usage.

Technical Acumen

• Technical Fluency: The ability to understand the technical solutions used in product delivery, partner with technical leaders (Architects, Principal Developers), and advocate effectively for the customer and business during engineering trade-off decisions.