Your New Role...We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Staff Product Manager to join our team and lead the development and enhancement of our personalization services. As a Staff Product Manager, you will play a pivotal role in defining the product strategy, driving innovation, and delivering exceptional user experiences. Your expertise and leadership will guide the direction of personalized and automate recommendations, ensuring they remain at the forefront of industry trends and customer expectations.
Your efforts will help us scale to >100m customers and become the leading streaming company. You will identify and quantify customer problems, determine approaches to address them, and A/B test different features to solve them. You will be part of a team of Product Managers focused on Personalization, working closely with Software Engineers and Data Scientists.
The team has a diverse range of skill sets, experience in Machine Learning, Recommenders, related fields across streaming media, e-commerce, and from top-flight tech firms. You will partner with Editorial and Marketing professionals and discuss your efforts regularly with company executives.
Your Role Accountabilities...We're seeking a seasoned Staff Product Manager to lead personalization efforts at WBD. This role is central to our mission to create intelligent, adaptive, and trusted experiences across HBO Max. The ideal candidate has deep experience with ML-driven recommendation at scale, thrives in technically complex ecosystems, and is equally fluent in data science, user behavior, and business impact.
As a key contributor for personalization at WBD, you will:
- Define Strategy: Own the end-to-end product strategy for ML-powered personalization and discovery. Identify opportunities that align with WBD's strategic goals and improve engagement, retention, and viewer satisfaction.
- Drive Roadmap: Lead roadmap development for personalization systems, coordinating closely with engineering, data science, UX, and content teams to prioritize initiatives that balance innovation, quality, and speed.
- Evolve the User Experience: Champion customer-centricity by leveraging experimentation, user research, and behavioral data to design and optimize personalized experiences across surfaces.
- Orchestrate Systems Thinking: Manage complex ranking systems and feedback loops. Understand how data (user signals, content metadata) flows through algorithms and influences outcomes across product surfaces.
- Stakeholder Leadership: Partner with executives, engineering leaders, data teams, and content strategists to align roadmaps, communicate outcomes, and translate vision into action.
- Benchmark and Differentiate: Monitor trends in personalization, ML tooling, and competitors' discovery experiences to inform roadmap priorities and strategic pivots.
- Measure Impact: Define KPIs that align with both user value and business metrics (e.g., engagement, diversity, and relevance). Use experimentation and analytics to optimize performance and guide iteration.
- Launch & Iterate: Lead go-to-market for major personalization capabilities, ensuring internal readiness, high-quality rollout, and learning-based iteration cycles.
Qualifications & Experience...- 8+ years of product management experience, with significant time spent on ML-driven products or content discovery systems.
- Proven track record of shipping consumer-facing personalization or recommendation systems at scale.
- Strong technical fluency-able to engage meaningfully with engineering and data science on ranking models, data pipelines, and ML evaluation.
- Deep understanding of A/B testing methodologies, statistical analysis, and product experimentation frameworks.
- Systems thinker who can connect the dots between algorithmic performance, customer experience treatments, and business outcomes.
- Excellent communicator who can synthesize complexity for a range of audiences, from executives to junior engineers.
- Experience leading cross-functional teams in agile environments; familiarity with tools like Jira and Confluence.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (preferred but not required).
How We Get Things Done...This last bit is probably the most important! Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.
