Lead Product Manager, Recommendations

Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding. Our four products — Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable — help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise. CULTURE AT SCRIBD, INC. We support a culture where our employees can be real and be bold; where we debate and commit as we embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. We believe the best work happens when individual flexibility is balanced with meaningful community connection. Scribd Flex empowers employees to choose the workstyle and location that support their best performance, while committing to intentional in-person moments that strengthen collaboration and culture. Occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd, Inc. employees, regardless of location. So what are we looking for in new team members? At Scribd, Inc., we hire for “GRIT.” Traditionally defined as the intersection of passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, GRIT reflects the mindset we expect from every employee. For us, it also serves as a practical framework for how we work: setting and achieving Goals, delivering Results within your role, contributing Innovative ideas and solutions, and strengthening the broader Team through collaboration and attitude. This posting reflects an approved, open position within the organization. Lead Product Manager, Recommendations In this role, you'll own Scribd's recommendations experience — helping 200 million monthly visitors discover content they didn't know they were looking for, across a corpus of 300 million documents. You'll work at the intersection of ML and product to surface the right content to the right person, at the right time. Success means defining a compelling vision, crafting metrics that truly matter, and experimenting your way to breakthrough features that redefine discovery — in close partnership with Engineering, Analytics, Data Science, Design, and Machine Learning teams. Responsibilities - Chart the long-term recommendations strategy — own a multi-year roadmap spanning candidate generation, ranking, and results presentation across Scribd's surfaces, guiding every user from interest to the right document - Partner with ML Engineering & Applied Research — translate cutting-edge retrieval and ranking research into production systems that blend collaborative signals, content embeddings, and real-time behavioral data for best-in-class personalization - Define the metrics that matter — establish and monitor leading indicators of recommendations success: engagement rate, click-through, content completion, and downstream subscription conversion and retention - Balance short-term wins with long-term vision — ship incremental relevance improvements that hit revenue goals while building an extensible recommendations platform aligned with Scribd's 3-year AI strategy - Fuse data with the voice of the customer — synthesize experiment results, behavioral analytics, user interviews, and feedback to inform prioritization and feature design - Communicate with clarity and influence — align product, engineering, design, content, and executive stakeholders by clearly articulating requirements, timelines, deliverables, and expected impact Qualifications - 8+ years of product management experience, including 4+ years leading recommendations or search products in a high-traffic consumer environment - Demonstrated success shipping ML-driven features that moved core business metrics (engagement, conversion, or revenue) at scale - Deep familiarity with retrieval and ranking algorithms, embeddings, and feature stores — paired with the ability to reason about end-to-end customer journeys for distinct user segments - Track record of thriving amid ambiguity: shaping a multi-year vision, aligning cross-functional teams, and delivering incremental wins along the way - Exceptional written and verbal communication skills — adep…