Senior Product Manager - Catalog

About the Role

At Salla, we are creating the foundational framework for commerce in the region, enabling thousands of merchants to launch, grow, and expand their businesses seamlessly. Our goal is to simplify complex processes into scalable, efficient solutions.

The catalog is the fundamental layer beneath all merchant interactions — the basis for storefronts, search, recommendations, landing pages, and all sales channels rely on the same unified product data source. Superior catalog data improves every surface simultaneously, while poor quality data cannot be compensated for by what sits above it.

There are two core challenges: First, the catalog is not assembled by us but by merchants or external parties like freelancers and agencies, who generally aim for speed over quality. The challenge is influencing the quality of what these external contributors produce, rather than cleaning it afterwards.

Second, product records must cater to different categories uniquely — what fashion merchants require differs vastly from pharmacies or grocery stores. Replicating solutions per category doesn’t scale; hence, we create a configurable, reusable approach.

Key Impact Areas

• Developing the Catalog Engine and Category Setup to support multiple categories through configuration rather than custom coding, ensuring fast, repeatable category onboarding.
• Managing Product Data Input processes including creation, bulk import, and editing to streamline data entry and quality at source.
• Shaping structure and meaning within the catalog: taxonomy, attributes, variants, identifiers, normalization, and duplicate handling.
• Incorporating AI Enrichment techniques to extract and generate product data responsibly, with defined confidence levels, review mechanisms, and correction loops.
• Ensuring product data is fit for purpose across downstream applications such as search results, storefronts, recommendations, and third-party sales channels.

Responsibilities

• Oversee end-to-end catalog strategy planning, with quarterly milestones, advocacy of the plan, and accountability for achieving defined outcomes.
• Direct the product roadmap focused on how product data is created and enhanced, prioritizing downstream effectiveness over mere field completion.
• Design for the actual data contributors, including those who are not store owners, streamlining workflows to make the optimal actions the quickest and easiest.
• Maintain new category additions as configuration changes instead of engineering projects, measuring and optimizing the efficiency improvements from initial to subsequent categories.
• Implement AI solutions where trust is earned: specify what is generated automatically, suggested for approval, or never altered, backed by confidence policies and continuous learning from merchant corrections.
• Define clear measures of catalog data quality tied to its impact on consuming platforms rather than arbitrary completeness metrics.
• Manage product data performance in external sales channels, handling their strict acceptance criteria and visible rejection issues.
• Determine the balance between mandatory structure and merchant freedom, defending this boundary from external pressures.
• Lead a team of 2 to 3 product managers by delegating ownership, coaching on strategic framing and execution quality, enforcing consistent delivery rhythms, and raising product standards.
• Collaborate systemically with teams relying on product data, including search and discovery, storefronts, vendors, marketplace, and data teams to ensure integrated success.

Candidate Requirements

• At least six years in product management, particularly on self-serve platforms where users create content or data, with accountability for the quality of their output.
• Proven ownership and improvement of a quantifiable data metric (e.g., data completeness, accuracy, publication speed, tool adoption, downstream data performance).
• Demonstrated success in influencing data quality during creation rather than through post-process cleanup; ability to discuss specific examples.
• Strong platform design judgment: experience building reusable solutions serving diverse cases via configuration, with insight into trade-offs between shared and specific features.
• Hands-on experience deploying AI for structured data tasks such as extraction, classification, generation, or matching, including handling confidence thresholds and error management at scale.
• Deep understanding of product data organization: taxonomies, attribute schemas, variants, identifiers, deduplication, and compliance with stringent external channel requirements.
• Experience coaching and mentoring product managers, prepared to lead a small team while remaining engaged in core product craft.
• Outcome-focused mindset with ability to navigate ambiguity rapidly, maintain clarity amid complexity, and understand downstream data dependencies intimately.
• Fluency in Arabic and English is mandatory; regional merchant experience preferred. Must be willing to relocate and work on-site in Saudi Arabia.