eCommerce Product Manager, Discovery + Taxonomy

Mattel•El Segundo, CA

3d•$126,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

This role focuses on how customers find, navigate, and explore products and content, spanning search, browse, filtering, and personalized discovery experiences. You will operate at the intersection of information architecture, metadata, AI-driven search, and recommendation systems, ensuring customers can seamlessly discover relevant products across both high-intent and inspiration-led journeys. At a global, cross-brand scale, you will balance consistency, scalability, and brand-specific needs, driving a unified discovery platform powered by a shared taxonomy, structured product data, and a design system. A critical component of this role is improving the quality, structure, and governance of product and taxonomy data to enable better search relevance, personalization, SEO performance, and emerging generative discovery experiences (GEO). You will identify high-impact opportunities within discovery and lead initiatives that improve findability, engagement, and conversion, using experimentation, data, and strong product judgment to prioritize effectively and drive measurable business outcomes.

Requirements

8+ years of product management experience in eCommerce, DTC, or data-driven products
Experience owning search, discovery, taxonomy, or information architecture systems
Strong analytical skills with experience in experimentation, A/B testing, and performance measurement
Proven ability to operate in complex, ambiguous environments and drive clarity and outcomes
Strong prioritization and decision-making skills, with the ability to balance customer, business, and technical trade-offs
Experience working cross-functionally with engineering, design, analytics and data science teams

Nice To Haves

Experience improving product data quality, metadata systems, or catalog platforms
Experience owning experimentation frameworks and using them to optimize product and algorithm performance
Experience with AI/ML-powered products, including search, recommendations, or personalization systems
Experience working with or optimizing ranking and recommendation algorithms
Familiarity with semantic search, vector databases, and LLM-based systems (RAG, embeddings, evaluation)
Experience with search platforms
Understanding of taxonomy, ontology, or knowledge graph concepts
Strong understanding of SEO as a growth channel, including technical SEO and content strategy alignment
Experience in eCommerce, marketplaces, or content-rich ecosystems

Responsibilities

Collaborate with senior leadership to shape and inform the discovery and taxonomy product roadmap, ensuring alignment to business priorities, customer needs, and scalable platform strategy
Drive the strategy and execution of search, browse, filtering, taxonomy, and discovery systems across Mattel DTC experiences
Define and evolve taxonomy structures, metadata models, and entity relationships across global product catalogs, enabling scalable and consistent discovery experiences
Improve product data quality and structure to support search relevance, personalization, recommendations, SEO performance, and AI-driven discovery
Partner with engineering to build scalable tagging and enrichment systems that ensure products are consistently and accurately categorized, enriched, and structured across platforms
Drive personalized discovery and recommendation strategies, including related products, “complete the set,” trending, and contextual recommendations, optimizing ranking and algorithm performance over time
Own and scale a robust experimentation framework, designing and prioritizing A/B and multivariate tests across search, browse, and recommendations to inform product decisions and algorithm optimization
Evaluate discovery performance using quantitative and qualitative signals (e.g., query behavior, model evaluation metrics, CTR, conversion), and continuously optimize experiences based on insights
Partner with analytics and engineering to improve AI-driven and LLM-powered discovery capabilities, including semantic search, query understanding, and hybrid retrieval systems
Drive SEO as a growth channel, ensuring taxonomy, product data, and content strategy support new customer acquisition and align with both traditional and generative search engines
Partner cross-functionally with merchandising, content, marketing, and analytics to ensure high-quality inputs into discovery systems, including structured metadata and SEO-optimized content
Translate complex backend systems and data models into intuitive, high-performing user experiences
Manage a diverse set of stakeholders and drive alignment across product, engineering, design, data science, and business teams
Facilitate discussions, navigate trade-offs, and ensure decisions are grounded in customer value, business impact, and platform scalability
Ensure all key use cases (including edge cases) are considered, delivering robust, scalable, and high-quality discovery experiences
Support broader eCommerce initiatives as needed, contributing to continuous improvement of the end-to-end journey