Staff Product Manager, Recommendations & Discovery

Babylist

4d•$214,057 - $256,885•Remote

About The Position

Babylist is seeking a Staff Product Manager to lead personalization and discovery initiatives across its consumer experience. This role will focus on the homepage feed, product recommendations, and the underlying ML systems that enhance the registry building process. While Babylist has a strong foundation in editorial recommendations, the company is now looking to leverage its extensive first-party data and AI capabilities to implement personalized, ML-powered recommendations across all consumer touchpoints. This is an opportunity for a product leader with experience in scaling ML personalization to shape and define this area for Babylist, which is early in its journey. The role involves owning the strategy and execution for recommendations and discovery, acting as the company's foremost expert in this domain, and partnering closely with the ML Engineering team to define product direction and technical strategy.

Requirements

Demonstrated product leadership experience within ML-powered consumer products.
Experience owning a recommendation, personalization, and/or discovery surface end-to-end at scale.
Held Senior PM, Staff PM, GPM, or comparable Lead roles.
Significant experience in B2C ML product development, having shipped recommendations, search, ranking, or personalization systems.
Fluency in concepts such as candidate generation vs. ranking, online vs. offline evaluation, cold start, exploration vs. exploitation, and novelty effects.
Understanding of ML system lifecycles, including data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
Ability to read model design docs, push back on architectural choices, and act as a peer to senior ML EMs.
Experience with early-stage ML development, understanding when rules or baselines are more appropriate than models.
Strategic foresight to articulate the maturity curve of personalization and discovery.
Deep customer expertise, with a track record of talking to customers directly and using qualitative and quantitative evidence in decision-making.
Commercial ownership, fluency in business drivers like registry completion, GMV, ad revenue, and retention.
Ability to defend unit economics models and partner with finance and data teams.
Extreme clarity in communication.
Active daily use of LLMs and AI coding tools for prototyping, analysis, and data querying.
Adaptability to change and a bias toward action.
Low ego and humility.

Nice To Haves

Background in e-commerce or marketplaces.
Experience helping build or scale an ML personalization function from scratch.

Responsibilities

Own recommendations and discovery at Babylist end-to-end, including strategy, KPIs, quality bar, and impact.
Set the one-year horizon for product personalization at Babylist, articulating future state and defending the sequence of bets to achieve it.
Act as a peer to the ML EM, jointly setting technical and product direction, and shaping modeling, data, and evaluation infrastructure.
Translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction for the ML team.
Set the quality bar for ML-powered experiences, defining what constitutes 'good' and 'unacceptable' for recommendations.
Raise the company's judgment regarding ML investment by educating leadership on where ML provides significant leverage.
Operate as an AI-enabled builder, using AI-native workflows for prototyping, analysis, and shipping.
Mentor and develop other PMs, contributing to hiring and raising the bar for the product management function.

Benefits

Competitive pay and meaningful opportunities for career advancement
Technology and data can solve hard problems
Commitment to career progression and performance-based advancement
Competitive salary with equity and bonus opportunities
Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
Retirement savings plan with company matching
Flexible spending accounts
Generous paid parental leave and PTO
Remote work stipend to set up your office
Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning