Staff Product Manager, Recommendations & Discovery

Babylist Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Canada

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Own end-to-end strategy, quality bar, and impact for recommendations and discovery across Babylist’s consumer experience, including homepage feed and ML-powered product suggestions.
• Set the one-year product horizon for personalization at Babylist, defining the sequence of bets and updating direction with conviction based on evidence and user feedback.
• Partner as a true peer with the ML Engineering team to shape model behavior, data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, deployment, monitoring, and evaluation infrastructure.
• Define what "good" and "unacceptable" look like for ML-powered recommendations, making hard tradeoffs between business goals and user-perceived relevance.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction for the ML team, ensuring alignment between product outcomes and model architecture.
• Raise the company’s collective judgment on ML investment by identifying where personalization compounds, what is table stakes, what is a real lever, and what to avoid.
• Operate as an AI-native product builder: use LLMs and AI coding tools daily to prototype, analyze data, query datasets, and ship fast — modeling AI-native PM craft for the team.
• Bring deep customer expertise to every decision through regular direct engagement with users, leveraging both qualitative insights and quantitative data.
• Own commercial outcomes tied to recommendations: drive registry completion, GMV, ad revenue, and retention by understanding unit economics and partnering directly with finance and data teams.
• Establish and maintain the quality bar for all discovery surfaces, ensuring ML experiences are responsible, transparent, and aligned with user trust.
• Mentor and develop other product managers, providing specific, timely feedback and contributing to hiring as the product team scales.
• Lead the evolution of Babylist’s personalization function from early-stage to scale, prioritizing depth over breadth — shipping one excellent recommender over six mediocre ones.
• Understand the full ML lifecycle, including cold start, exploration vs. exploitation, novelty effects, and failure modes, without writing production code.
• Apply builder’s instinct to early-stage ML: know when a rule beats a model, when a guardrail is needed, and when a hard-coded baseline is the right first step.
• Communicate with extreme clarity to move conversations forward quickly, avoiding consensus-driven delays and owning decisions with conviction.
• Adapt proactively to change, working across team boundaries without waiting for permission, and maintaining humility, low ego, and bias toward action.
• Leverage Babylist’s rich first-party dataset in parenting to build personalized experiences that address latent intent, life-stage progression, and multi-stakeholder gift dynamics.
• Shape how the entire company thinks about personalization, becoming the definitive internal voice on recommendations and discovery.

🎯 Requirements

• Proven experience owning a recommendation, personalization, or discovery surface end-to-end in a consumer-facing product at scale
• Deep technical fluency in ML systems, including data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and evaluation — able to partner as a peer with senior ML engineers
• Demonstrated ability to ship ML-powered products responsibly, understanding tradeoffs between business objectives and user value, and recognizing failure modes
• Experience building or scaling an ML personalization function from scratch, with a builder’s instinct for early-stage investment
• Strong commercial ownership: fluency in how recommendations impact GMV, retention, ad revenue, and registry completion
• Active, daily use of AI tools (LLMs, coding assistants) to prototype, analyze, and accelerate work — with intuition for current model strengths and limitations

🏖️ Benefits

• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts
• Generous paid parental leave and PTO
• Winter Wonder Week: company-wide paid week off at year-end
• Remote work stipend to set up your home office
• Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning

Skills & Technologies

REST

Product Management

Senior

Remote

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Babylist Inc.

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About Babylist Inc.

Babylist operates an online baby registry platform that lets expectant parents add items from any retailer, book services, and create cash funds. It aggregates products across major stores, offers a universal registry browser button, and provides personalized checklists. The company also sells its own line of baby merchandise, including nursery furniture, strollers, and accessories, through its e-commerce storefront. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Babylist supports parents with expert guides, product reviews, and a mobile app for managing registries, tracking gifts, and coordinating shipping to recipients.

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