THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Zalando’s Transport Management System (First, Middle & Last Mile) is used across all transportation operations in Zalando’s network. With the move to a more flexible, platform-based architecture, we have ensured that additional optimisation potential is unlocked. The full realisation of this potential, however, at the current stage, often involves strategically rethinking and working on complete process chains with a long horizon of impact. The role thus focuses on such strategic areas across the board and helps elevate the work of the product team by supporting with deep dives, discovery, proper opportunity sizing and first project initiation. It is a senior position within a scaled Product delivery organisation that brings together the strong sides of consultancy services and the hands-on motivation of domain experts. The areas where the role will lend support are:

1: Building and optimisation of Zalando’s transport systems

2: Central exchanges of capacities and cut-offs with the higher level of the system

3: Customs services optimisation, data model and interface design

WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)

In the areas you’re assigned to:

• Onboard quickly to the problem space, dive deep and be able to formulate a product strategy incorporating mid- to long-term potential features and requirements
• You will provide thought leadership to and collaborate closely with a cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, analysts and designers. To enable you to fully focus on defining and executing against the multi-year product strategy, you won’t have direct people responsibility but act as senior individual contributor
• Collaborate closely with a wide variety of stakeholders - from Operational teams, to process improvement, network planning and budgeting teams in order to drive consensus around your product vision
• Backup your intuition, ideas and decisions through data-driven insights, well thought-through architectural proposals (discussed and taken with principal-level architects in the organisations) and a good understanding of e-commerce KPIs and fulfilment processes
• Author all important product artefacts including an initial product roadmap, working backwards press releases, definition of product requirements, as well as functional specifications and mid to large scale solution papers
• Pitch phased execution plans backed up by an understanding of team dependencies and capacities; where needed - pitch for additional resources
• Mentor more junior product team members and strategically hand over tasks to them when relevant, in keeping with a cohesive plan for achieving the impact you’ve uncovered
• Define initial KPIs, understand how they impact our business performance long-term, use them to drive understanding for the topic among all stakeholders and monitor success over time