Senior Product Manager - Catalog

Role Overview

Senior Product Manager - Catalog at Salla, based in Saudi Arabia. You will drive product strategy and execution for the catalog layer that underpins all commerce on the Salla platform, serving thousands of regional merchants across diverse categories.

Company Overview

Salla is building the digital backbone of commerce in the region, empowering thousands of merchants to start, grow, and scale their businesses. The company turns what is complex into something simple, powerful, and scalable.

Role Purpose

The Catalog is the foundational layer underneath everything—storefronts, search, recommendations, landing pages, and every channel merchants sell through all read from the same product data. You will own the strategy, roadmap, and quality of how product data gets created, structured, enriched, and consumed across the platform. Your focus is not cleaning data after the fact, but changing what merchants and their teams produce at the moment they create it, across diverse categories with different requirements, using configuration rather than code to scale.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Roadmap

• Own the catalog strategy end to end: sequence it into quarters, defend it in the room, and hold it accountable to the numbers it promised.
• Own the roadmap for how product data gets created and improved on Salla, prioritized on whether the data works downstream rather than on how many fields are filled.
• Decide how much structure to impose and where merchants stay free, then defend that line against pressure from both directions.

Catalog Engine & Category Scaling

• Keep a new category a configuration change rather than an engineering project, and be able to show the difference in effort between the first one and the next.
• Build the Catalog Engine and Category Setup as one engine built once, with what each category needs from a product record expressed as configuration rather than code, so supporting one more category is fast and repeatable.

Data Input & User Experience

• Design for the people who actually do the work, including the ones who do not own the store, and make the good path the fastest path rather than a longer one enforced by rules.
• Own product data input: creation, bulk import, editing, and everything that happens at the moment someone types or uploads.

Data Quality & Definition

• Define what catalog quality means at Salla and instrument it honestly, tied to the surfaces that consume the data rather than to completeness for its own sake.
• Change what users produce at the moment they produce it, rather than cleaning it up afterwards in a pipeline.

Structure, Meaning & Normalization

• Own structure and meaning: taxonomy, attributes, variants, identifiers, normalization, and duplicates.

AI Enrichment

• Put AI to work where it earns trust: decide what to generate outright, what to suggest for approval, and what to never touch, with a stated confidence policy and a loop that learns from every correction a merchant makes.

Downstream Performance

• Own how product data performs in external selling channels, where the requirements are strict and the rejections are visible.
• Define downstream fitness: how this data actually performs where it is consumed—search results, storefronts, recommendations, and external channel feeds.

Team Leadership

• Lead 2 to 3 product managers: give them real ownership, coach their framing and craft, run a reliable cadence, and raise the quality bar of what the group ships.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work as one system with the teams that depend on this data: search and discovery, storefronts, vendors, marketplace, and data.

Qualifications & Experience

• Six or more years in product management, including work on a self-serve platform where users created their own content or data and you were accountable for the quality of what they produced.
• Demonstrated success moving a metric owned in data: completeness that meant something, accuracy, time to publish, adoption of a data tool, or the performance of that data somewhere downstream.
• Evidence that you changed what users produced at the moment they produced it, rather than cleaning it up afterwards in a pipeline.
• Platform judgment: you have built something once and made it serve many cases through configuration, and you can explain where you drew the line between what was shared and what was specific, and what that choice cost you.
• Hands-on experience with AI in production for structured data: extraction, classification, generation, or matching. You can talk concretely about confidence thresholds, error rates, what you let through automatically, and what you did when it was wrong at scale.
• Literacy in how product data is actually structured: taxonomies, attribute schemas, variants, identifiers, matching and deduplication, and the strict requirements external selling channels impose.
• Experience coaching product managers, formally or not, and readiness to lead a small team without stepping away from the craft yourself.
• Merchant context in this region is preferred over theoretical knowledge.

Skills & Competencies

• Own outcomes rather than roadmaps; move quickly through ambiguity; build clarity where others see noise.
• Stay close to the details and cannot guard your own area, because this data belongs to everyone downstream.
• Full professional fluency in Arabic and English.

Additional Information

• Willing to relocate to Saudi Arabia and work on-site.