Product Manager - Search

Staples Product Manager

Staples is business to business. You're what binds us together.

Our eCommerce team delivers customer-centric site experiences to position Staples as a digital selling platform of choice. Our team ensures that our mobile, desktop, and app platforms deliver the digital experience that our customers expect. We do this through customer insights, analytics, and testing to build a strong innovation pipeline for the future and to bring products and solutions to market seamlessly. We utilize online merchandising and campaigns executed by both humans and automated tools to convert new and returning website visitors into customers. We work end-to-end with our sales, merchandising, finance, logistics, marketing, and technology teams to provide a world-class, holistic digital experience, growing profitable results in a fun and rewarding work environment. We are inclusive, customer-obsessed, and are looking for well-rounded professionals with strong eCommerce business acumen to join our team.

The product manager plays a critical role in shaping the future of our eCommerce platforms. This individual is responsible for leveraging customer insights, analytics, and market trends to define and prioritize product backlogs, ensuring our mobile, desktop and app platforms deliver exceptional digital experiences. This role collaborates closely with engineering teams to bring innovative products and solutions to market, driving growth and enhancing customer satisfaction.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Collaborate with leadership to define the product vision and align it with the overarching business and digital strategy.
• Own the product backlog, meticulously managing and prioritizing user stories, bugs and tasks based on strategic business goals, customer value, and team capacity.
• Serve as the key point of contact between the development team and stakeholders.
• Craft detailed user stories and acceptance criteria to guide the development process.
• Champion a mindset of continuous improvement, encouraging the team to experiment with new ideas and approaches to solve customer problems.

What You Bring To The Table:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make data-driven decisions.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, capable of working effectively with technical and non-technical teams.
• Agile and adaptable, with a proactive approach to addressing challenges and seizing opportunities.
• Leadership and mentorship capabilities, with a passion for fostering team growth and development.
• Expertise in on-site search optimization, including relevance tuning, ranking model refinement, synonym/redirect management, and algorithmic improvements that directly impact conversion and revenue.
• Demonstrated ability to partner across business, UX, engineering, merchandising, and vendor teams to deliver search experiences that balance business priorities with customer needs- especially for complex B2B catalog structures.
• Hands-on experience driving roadmap decisions for search platforms, including build-vs-buy analysis, vendor integrations (e.g., Elastic, Solr, or AI-powered search providers), and A/B testing strategies to validate improvements.

What's Needed- Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Technology, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of related experience in product management, with a focus on eCommerce or digital products.
• Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of digital products from conception through development, launch, and iteration.
• Comprehensive understanding and practical application of Agile methodologies, tools, and systems.

What's Needed- Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in a related field.
• Professional certifications in Agile methodologies (e.g., Certified Scrum Master (CSM), SAFe Agilist, or PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)) or product management certifications (e.g., AIPMM Certified Product Manager).
• Experience in the specific industry (e.g. B2B, supply chain, office supplies).
• Deep understanding of enterprise search technologies and AI-enhanced search, including LLM search augmentation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), query intent classification, vector search, and semantic ranking.
• Experience with search platforms and tooling such as Elastic, Solr, Algolia, Pinecone, OpenAI, Anthropic, or LangChain—plus managing integrations with third-party vendors in a large-scale eCommerce environment.
• Proven track record of delivering search-driven revenue improvements through data-driven experimentation, AB testing, and continuous optimization in a high SKU-count B2B or omnichannel retail business.

We Offer:

• Inclusive culture with associate-led Business Resource Groups
• 22 days of PTO and Holiday Schedule (7 observed paid holidays + 1 floating holiday)
• Online and Retail Discounts, Company Match 401(k), Physical and Mental Health Wellness Programs, and more!