Senior Product Manager (For temp workers)

Role Description

Booking.com’s Cars business unit relies on high-quality, reliable Supply Data to power the entire booking funnel - from search and view to book and post-book experiences - while also ensuring compliance with evolving regulatory requirements and internal financial processes. Supply Data sits at the core of customer experience, commercial performance and operational integrity.

As a Senior Product Manager for Supply Data in Cars, you will ensure continuity and strategic oversight of this critical domain. You are not just maintaining a data roadmap; you are protecting the data foundations that enable customers to confidently discover and book cars, Commercial teams to drive performance, and the company to remain compliant. You will act as the central point of contact across Product, Engineering and Commercial, balancing operational complexity, regulatory risk and business priorities to ensure stable delivery and clear decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy

• Own and evolve the long-term strategy for Supply Data in Cars, ensuring it supports customer experience, commercial performance, regulatory compliance and scalability.

  
  

• Translate company-level priorities into a clear set of artefacts.

  
  

• Define and continuously refine the roadmap to balance short-term impact with long-term gains.

  
  

• Identify risks and opportunities within the supply data ecosystem and proactively shape direction rather than react to incoming requests.

  
  

• Own and define objectives at Team and Track levels.

• Own release strategy and planning for the product.

  
  

• Fluent spokesperson for their team and track strategy. Able to generate alignment across domains and teams.

Product Delivery

• Partner closely with the Engineering Manager to ensure critical company priorities are delivered with high quality and predictability.

  
  

• Prioritise the right initiatives at the right time, making reasonable and well-communicated trade-offs.

  
  

• Ensure alignment across dependent teams and proactively manage cross-domain dependencies.

  
  

• Drive clarity in scope, outcomes and success metrics, so that delivery remains outcome-oriented rather than output-driven.

  
  

• Maintain operational stability of the domain, particularly where customer experience, compliance or financial risk is involved.

  
  

• Manage long term roadmaps with significantly larger complexity and scope than more junior PMs. Often with dependencies across multiple teams/tracks.

Data Fluency

• Develop and maintain a strong understanding of the Supply Data landscape across different data domains (e.g., car rental inventory, legal details, sanctions screening).

  
  

• Ensure data powering the business is accurate, consistent and fit for purpose across multiple consumers.

  
  

• Understand how data is created, transformed, distributed and consumed across systems.

  
  

• Make informed decisions around data integrity, ownership boundaries and long-term data model evolution.

  
  

• Understand how to analyse data and present findings to stakeholders, as well as make product decisions with the results.

  
  

• Define (with analysts) best ways to present KPIs for tracking product success.

  
  

• Deal with ambiguous and complex data where proxy metrics might be needed.

Tech Fluency

• Partner with the Engineering Manager (Tech Lead)

  
  

• Demonstrate comfort working with APIs, system integrations and service-based architectures.

  
  

• Possess a solid grasp of data-related technologies, including data storage, data streams and event-driven systems.

  
  

• Advocate for the customer and business in engineering tradeoff decisions.

  
  

• Understand what the most critical elements of the technical solution are, explain and justify the chosen technical solutions.

  
  

• Engage in meaningful technical discussions with Engineering, challenge assumptions constructively and understand trade-offs between speed, scalability and maintainability.

  
  

• Ensure solutions are robust, extensible and aligned with broader platform architecture and engineering decisions.

  
  

• Understand how the multiple systems used to deliver the product are interrelated and anticipate more complex problems or edge cases.

  
  

• Build bridges between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Stakeholder Management

• Act as the central point of alignment across Product, Engineering, Commercial, Finance, Risk and Compliance.

  
  

• Proactively identify stakeholder pain points and translate them into structured, prioritised initiatives and well-documented artefacts.

  
  

• Facilitate alignment across multiple domains, ensuring Supply Data evolves cohesively rather than fragmenting across teams.

  
  

• Escalate thoughtfully when decisions materially impact company-level commitments or regulatory exposure.

  
  

• Represent the work of the team in a convincing and engaging way.

  
  

• Manage stakeholder expectations with timely, concise and clear progress updates, adapted to stakeholder needs and via different mediums (verbal, written, presentation).

  
  

• Manage expectations up to Director level (occasionally LT).

  
  

• Handle challenging stakeholders more independently.

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

Qualifications & Skills

• 5+ years of proven experience in Technical Product Management, specifically within high-scale backend ecosystems or leading Developer experience teams.

  
  

• Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical constraints to business leaders and translate business goals into clear technical requirements for engineers.

  
  

• Developer-Focused: You view other engineers as your customers and are passionate about making technical processes simple, well-documented and efficient.

  
  

• Strong stakeholder management skills: Experience influencing senior leadership and aligning roadmaps across different product areas.

  
  

• Strategic thinking: you are comfortable working in an ambiguous environment and can align roadmaps across multiple business units.

  
  

• Analytical mindset: The ability to use data to identify system bottlenecks and guide the platform’s technical roadmap.

  
  

• You have a deep understanding of how different software services interact in a global, high-scale environment. You prioritize long-term system health alongside immediate business needs.

  
  

• Proven expertise in system design: You understand the trade-offs of distributed systems, including data consistency, latency and reliability.

  
  

• Experience with API design and event-driven architecture: You are comfortable working with RESTful services and messaging systems to keep data synchronized across a global company.