Senior Director, Product Management (Media)

Be essential at Cars Commerce

At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challenge and Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don't take our word for it. We are proud to be named one of Built In's 2026 Best Places to Work in Chicago and across the U.S. Ready to make your mark? Join a team that's driving real change in the automotive industry.

Product Leader of Media Initiatives for Cars.com

CARS COMMERCE  |  JOB DESCRIPTION

Director of Product Management, Cars.com Media

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About Us

Cars.com (NYSE: CARS) is an audience-driven technology company empowering the automotive industry. We enable confident car buying and selling decisions for consumers via powerful products, solutions, machine learning, and model-driven artificial intelligence technologies that span pre-tail, retail, and post-sale activities.

Our mission is to build the most trusted and intelligent marketplace for buying and selling cars, while accelerating efficient and profitable retail operations for dealer customers.

The Cars Commerce platform is organized around key assets:

• Cars.com (Marketplace): The number one automotive marketplace brand with more than 30% traffic growth over the past five years
• Dealer Inspire (Websites & Digital Experience): Digital marketing technology & services that are endorsed by nearly every OEM

Cars.com also has additional products that further enrich the Dealer experience and strengthen their experience on the marketplace

• AccuTrade (Trade & Appraisal): Powering profitability with the right price on any vehicle, every time
• Cars.com Media Network: Pure in-market audience across social, video, search, display, and custom content
• DealerClub: Reputation based Dealer to Dealer wholesale auction platform which provides a valuable additional inventory control to Dealers, enabling them to increase their efficiency, keeping only the vehicles on their lot that they want to focus on with their retail consumers.
  

Scope

As a Director of Product at CARS, you will deliver growth by solving consumer and customer challenges unique to the automotive retail industry. As a product org leader, you will oversee the full lifecycle of product development for a suite of strategically important products. You will deliver industry leading innovation and value delivery through your team of product managers. You will define the strategy and lead innovation for your product suite; hire, develop, and coach your team of PMs; and define effective strategies for product development. You will work with cross-functional leadership (UX design, engineering, research, marketing, and analysts) to deliver a best-in-class product roadmap (including well defined, validated, and prioritized epics/initiatives). You will define product goals that deliver business growth and consumer/customer impact, and ensure that those goals are met.

As a Director of Product, you are a creative problem solver, people leader, and executor driven by positive outcomes for our users. You demonstrate trust in and dedication to our vision, mission and values. You have strong customer empathy and make product decisions based on both qualitative and quantitative customer, industry knowledge, and business data. You make decisions by optimizing for ROI and driving bottom-line/top-line performance. You have a passion for solving complex, multi-sided marketplace problems, developing strategies and roadmaps, and executing plans that create new value for our users and our business. You are a natural collaborator and communicator who has a track record of building positive relationships across a broad, diverse organization. You can establish, communicate, and gain buy-in for a vision that extends across our full ecosystem of products.

As Director of Product for Media, you will own the company's advertising business end to end: the on-site advertising experience served directly to visitors on our marketplace platform, and an audience-based media network that packages our first-party audience data and activates it across external channels such as programmatic buying platforms, social, connected TV and streaming video, online video, display, and audio, all in service of both OEM and dealer customers. You will also play a critical role in defining the media and data technology stack that underpins how media is operated across both Cars.com and Dealer Inspire, with a unique focus on building the media operating system layer of Dealer Inspire Media Services, a dealer-specific media agency model.

Essential Functions

• Define and deliver the roadmap for the Cars.com and Dealer Inspire media platforms.
• Own the product strategy and roadmap for on-site advertising across the Cars.com marketplace platform, including ad placement design, new ad formats, and the underlying ad-serving technology, balancing revenue growth with a strong visitor experience, for both OEM and dealer customers.
• Partner with the Commerce Media delivery team on the strategy and expansion of the audience-based Cars.com Media Network, that packages the company's first-party audience data and activates it across external advertising channels, including programmatic buying platforms, social platforms, connected TV and streaming video, online video, display, and audio (among other channels).
• Define and drive the media technology and data roadmap that supports how media is planned, bought, delivered, and automated at scale across the organization's two primary media activation departments, Cars.com Media Network and Dealer Inspire Media Services, ensuring the underlying tools and data infrastructure are efficient, scalable, and built in close coordination with each other rather than in isolation.
• Closely collaborate with internal Data Strategy teams and the Commerce Media delivery team on the measurement and attribution strategy for media products, ensuring reporting connects advertising investment to real, demonstrable business outcomes for customers, i.e. cross-platform identity resolution, closed-loop measurement, 3P automotive sales data sources, etc.
• Make clear build, buy, or partner recommendations for media and advertising technology capabilities, staying current on the broader advertising and media technology landscape.
• Ensure media products and data practices comply with evolving privacy regulations and industry standards.
• Demonstrate an ownership mindset, working with teams across the organization to deliver the solutions our customers need, as well as the outcomes enabling customer success.
• Understand dealers’ needs in detail and ensure the problems are clearly defined and prioritized - making tradeoffs between scope, cost, schedule and business benefits to ensure the team is always focused on the highest impact work.
• Collaborate with cross-functional leaders to improve our processes and ensure team alignment towards goals.
• Define, monitor, and measure team level goals (KPIs/OKRs), through the delivery of world class products.  Measure and communicate successes and opportunities at all organizational levels.
• Establish yourself as an expert and thought leader across the full CARS product space.
• Communicate roadmaps, updates and key accomplishments effectively and broadly throughout the organization.
• Work across other internal teams to establish clear interconnected roadmaps to align on intersection points.
  

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, economics, or related field; or equivalent work experience.
• At least 10 years of experience as a product manager / product management leader (across mobile and web) with at least 3 years of leading and developing a team of product managers.
• An impressive track-record of 0-1 and 1-N product development for high-impact, high visibility products.
• Experience defining and executing high level product strategy.
• Demonstrated experience building and scaling advertising or media products for a digital publisher, audience-based media network, or similar advertising business, with ownership of roadmap, strategy, and measurable commercial outcomes.
• Experience with the advertising technology ecosystem, including on-site ad serving (Google Ad Manager), order management (Operative), and yield management (YieldEx, Burt), and off-site programmatic (DV 360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP), social advertising platforms (Meta, TikTok), and identity / data onboarding (LiveRamp, Neustar).
• Strong understanding of audience data activation, first-party data strategy, and privacy-safe data practices, along with applicable data privacy regulations.
• Experience with identity, media measurement, and attribution, including reporting that connects advertising performance to downstream business outcomes.
• History of partnering with sales and revenue teams to translate customer needs into product requirements and a prioritized roadmap.
• Passion about solving complex, multi-sided marketplace problems, developing strategies and roadmaps, and executing plans that create new value for our users and our business
• Experience building and leading high performing and happy teams.
• Demonstrated product sense with deep understanding of UX design principles and product experimentation (i.e. A/B testing, User testing, etc.).
• Strong analytical skills and a commitment to data driven decision making.
• You have experience working across the entire product process (strategy through to delivery) and have exceptional grasp of the fundamental principles of product management, lean product development and agile practices.
• Experience defining KPIs and product metrics and using them to drive decisions, and pairing that with a sense for how and when to balance data with intuition.
  

Nice to Have Qualifications

• MBA or other advanced degree.
• Experience as a software engineer.
• Experience working in e-commerce, media, retail, marketplaces, martech, transportation, logistics, or a related sector.
• Experience in a two-sided marketplace connecting advertisers or customers with a consumer audience.
• Familiarity with data clean room technologies and privacy-safe data collaboration approaches for the purpose of audience activation and reporting within the media activation space.
• SQL, Tableau, and/or other data analysis skills.

In the spirit of pay transparency, we are excited to share the base salary range for this position. In addition to base salary, some roles are eligible for our bonus and/or equity programs, depending on level and role. Regular full-time positions are eligible for our comprehensive benefits package. If you are hired at Cars Commerce, your final base salary compensation will be determined based on factors such as skills and/or experience. If the salary range is close to what you're seeking, then we encourage you to apply and learn more about the total compensation package for this position. Salary Range $175,800.00-219,750.00

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans
• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up
• Generous PTO
• Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!

For US-based Positions: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. Please note that we are unable to sponsor employment visas at this time.
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