Product Manager, Personalization (mat leave contract)

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end vision and execution of Kobo’s eCommerce personalization strategy, defining quarterly OKRs and a 12-month roadmap that increases conversion, average order value, and lifetime value for 30 million global readers.
• • Translate business goals into a living product backlog of user stories, epics, and acceptance criteria for the Data Science, Engineering, UX, and Marketing teams; ruthlessly prioritize features based on expected lift versus effort and continuously re-sequence as new data emerges.
• • Partner with the Data Team to evolve our GCP-hosted recommendation engine—tuning collaborative-filtering, content-based, and hybrid models—so every customer sees the right book at the right moment across web, iOS, Android, and e-reader touchpoints.
• • Design and run rigorous A/B and multivariate experiments on personalized home rows, dynamic pricing, segmented email campaigns, and in-app carousels; analyze statistical significance, write concise post-mortems, and socialize wins and losses to foster a culture of experimentation.
• • Conduct qualitative user research with UX researchers and customer support to uncover discovery pain points for power readers, casual browsers, and first-time buyers; convert insights into hypotheses that feed the experimentation pipeline.
• • Serve as the single source of truth for personalization KPIs—CTR, conversion rate, revenue per visitor, retention cohorts—building self-service Looker dashboards and weekly executive briefs that keep stakeholders aligned and informed.
• • Collaborate with Marketing to inject real-time behavioral triggers into CRM journeys, ensuring promotional content is contextually relevant and compliant with GDPR/CCPA privacy standards.
• • Champion accessibility and inclusive design principles so personalization benefits every reader, including those with visual impairments or dyslexia preferences.
• • Maintain competitive intelligence on Amazon, Apple Books, Spotify, and emerging AI-driven discovery startups; benchmark our algorithms and surface white-space opportunities.
• • Facilitate sprint planning, backlog grooming, and retros with a cross-functional squad of 6–8 engineers and data scientists, ensuring stories meet the Definition of Ready and ship on schedule.
• • Document technical constraints and data dependencies in concise PRDs that enable engineers to estimate accurately and reduce cycle time from idea to production.
• • Present quarterly business reviews to the VP of Product and Rakuten Tokyo leadership, translating complex ML improvements into revenue impact and customer delight stories.
• • Mentor junior PMs and analysts on experimentation design, SQL best practices, and storytelling with data, fostering a culture of continuous learning within the Reading Experience tribe.
• • Embrace Kobo’s “make reading lives better” mission by staying an active reader yourself—dog-fooding new features, writing internal blog posts, and sharing favorite titles in our #book-club Slack channel.