Catalog Product and Business Owner

OVERVIEW:

We are looking for a senior addition to the team to own our core asset - our catalog of product information and meta-data. The catalog owner will work closely with marketing, engineering and external partners to craft a content strategy, establish and manage a collection process, and improve our search application. Key objective will be to improve search relevancy and search traffic through catalog comprehensiveness (breadth, depth and diversity) and meta-data extraction.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Work with marketing, product and search teams to prioritize catalog initiatives based on consumer and product needs as well as consumer acquisition opportunities
• Work with data aggregation, data mining and natural language processing teams to develop processes that optimize quantity, quality and cost-effectiveness:

  • Determine what product types and what sites to aggregate
  • Balance short and long term priorities with multiple aggregation and meta-data extraction methods: manual augmentation, robotic collection, automated extraction, off-web methods and outsourcing
  • Normalize, merge and augment from multiple sources for millions of structured and unstructured products
  • Manage high throughput initiatives and prototype new scrappy methods to get to the long tail, the deep web, the dark web and the off web
  • Determine how to collect, organize, extract and display different content types - video, images, articles, blogs, print publications, expert vs. consumer reviews, business-direct content
  • Work effectively with wicked smart engineers and scientists - domestic and offshore

• Develop partner programs to accelerate aggregation with inbound feeds; potentially accelerate distribution via outbound feeds
• Set metrics and validate progress and changes against baseline performance and quality tests, develop test sets using manual and semi-automated techniques

  • Manage editorial and manual tuning efforts to improve machine learning and establish and measure quality and relevancy standards

• Mine catalog for creative and pragmatic opportunities to improve product and for insights to drive PR and awareness
• Have fun while building the largest, most useful travel catalog in the world

EXPERIENCE:

• 5+ years of well rounded, multi-disciplinary roles and demonstrated results that required strategic, detail-oriented and teamwork skills in unstructured environments
• Comfort working with engineering and quick grasp of technical problems and solutions
• Experience with web search or other information-retrieval applications
• Process-oriented with experience with QA and outsourcing, balanced with ability to quickly research ideas, develop prototypes and take them to full production
• Demonstrated excellent business and consumer judgment
• Experience with structured data, SQL and data-intensive processing systems
• Comfort with statistical methods
• Have a better sense of humor than the average bear
• Comfort with owning a critical role with a roadmap that never ends and constant need to deliver short term results