Staff Product Manager - Personalization

StubHub is on a mission to redefine the live event experience on a global scale. Whether someone is looking to attend their first event or their hundredth, we’re here to delight them all the way from the moment they start looking for a ticket until they step through the gate. The same goes for our sellers. From fans selling a single ticket to the promoters of a worldwide stadium tour, we want StubHub to be the safest, most convenient way to offer a ticket to the millions of fans who browse our platform around the world.

StubHub is seeking a Staff Product Manager to lead Personalization for our consumer product. This is the role that decides how well StubHub knows each fan, and how much of that knowledge shows up in what they see, when we reach them, and what we recommend. Millions of people come to us to decide what to go to. We want every one of them to feel that StubHub was built around their taste, and we want that feeling to turn into a relationship that lasts for years.

You will own the product strategy and roadmap for the shared ranking, fan understanding and predictive capabilities that power personalization across StubHub. You’ll partner with Search, Discovery and CRM teams to bring those capabilities into their experiences and measure the incremental impact on repeat purchase, frequency and lifetime value. The work is hard in the ways that matter: live events are time-limited inventory, fan interests shift with every tour announcement and playoff run, and the difference between a good recommendation and a great one is the difference between a browse and a purchase. Location: Hybrid (3 days in office / 2 days remote) – New York, NY or Century City, CA About the Team: The Direct Demand Consumer Product team at StubHub has one job: own the relationship with the fan. We want StubHub to be the place people start when they are deciding what to go to, the place they come back to without being reminded, and the place that already knows what they will love before they search for it. The business outcome is a best-in-class lifetime value engine: more fans who buy again, more often, and at higher value, because the product earned it.

As a senior individual contributor, you’ll shape how millions of fans discover their next unforgettable live experience. Working alongside machine learning engineers, data scientists and backend engineers, you’ll turn an understanding of each fan into recommendations that feel timely, relevant and worth coming back for. You’ll partner with Design, Research and Data Infrastructure teams to connect what fans want with what our technology makes possible.

You’ll set the direction for the shared personalization systems powering Search, Discovery and CRM, owning the roadmap, model objectives and capabilities that help every team build better fan experiences. Partner PMs will lead their surfaces and channels; together, you’ll decide where to invest, what to test and how to measure success. Your impact will extend across the consumer product: helping fans find more events they love, giving them reasons to return and building capabilities that make every team more effective.

What You'll Own:
Three systems, and the strategy that ties them together.

• Personalization & ranking: Own the shared recommendation and ranking capabilities that help teams decide what to show each fan. Define model objectives, signals and evaluation criteria, and partner with surface PMs to balance relevance, freshness, price, availability and business requirements. Build approaches that work for both returning fans and visitors we know little about.

• Taste & intent understanding: Everything StubHub knows about a fan should live in one place, and this lane owns it. That means which signals count as taste (purchases, follows, searches, what they lingered on, what they skipped), how they are weighted and how fast they decay, how a profile forms from the first session, and how it stays current when a tour is announced or a team makes the playoffs.

• Predictive Lifecycle Signals: Own the shared models and signals that help teams understand purchase intent, retention risk and likely incremental response to outreach or offers. Partner with CRM and Growth to make these signals actionable and evaluate whether interventions change behavior. CRM and Growth own campaign execution, messaging and incentive strategy.

What You'll Do:

• Own the personalization strategy. Decide where a deeper understanding of each fan creates the most value, for the fan and for lifetime value, and turn that into a multi-year plan for ranking, taste modeling and prediction. Make the case to leadership for the models, data and infrastructure that plan requires.

• Define what a personalized StubHub feels like. Set the product principles: when to show something familiar versus something new, how to treat a first-time visitor with no history, how recommendations stay current as events sell out and new ones go on sale, and how to keep the system from narrowing what people see over time.

• Build one system that serves many surfaces. Design personalization so that search, discovery, and CRM flows all draw on the same understanding of the fan, rather than each surface inventing its own.

• Turn fan understanding into a durable asset. Own the taste and intent model as a product in its own right: what signals feed it, how fresh it stays, how coverage grows across the user base, and how it is exposed to the teams that need it.

• Prove incremental impact. Partner with surface teams to design experiments and holdouts that measure personalization’s contribution to repeat purchase, frequency and lifetime value. Connect near-term metrics to longer-term outcomes, report results in business terms and be candid about what is not working.

• Lead the technical conversation. Build fluency in the models, features, pipelines and serving architecture behind personalization.

• Get other teams to adopt what you build. A ranking system or audience that no one uses has no value. Make the platform easier to adopt than to work around, remove the friction that keeps teams from integrating, and earn the trust of PMs whose results depend on your work.

• Communicate across the company. Present strategy, results and trade-offs to executives, product leadership and partner teams, and explain model behavior in plain terms to non-technical audiences.

• Raise the bar for the product organization. Mentor other PMs on experiment design, working with ML teams and data-informed prioritization, and help shape how the consumer product team operates.

What You've Done:

• Built personalization at scale. 8+ years in product management on consumer web or native mobile products, including at least 3 years owning recommendations, ranking or personalization systems. You have shipped ML-powered experiences at consumer scale and can explain the incremental business results they produced.

• Grown lifetime value, not just conversion. You have moved repeat purchase, retention or frequency in a consumer business and can explain which levers worked, which did not, and how you knew.

• Proven impact with controlled evidence. A track record of holdouts and experiments that isolate incremental effect, and of making decisions from that evidence even when it contradicted a strong prior.

• Technical depth. Working knowledge of recommendation and ranking systems, user modeling and the data infrastructure behind them. You can read a model evaluation, question an offline-to-online gap, and argue a trade-off with ML engineers and data scientists on their terms.

• Platform judgment. Ability to balance the needs of multiple product teams and identify when a shared capability creates more value than a surface-specific solution. Prior ownership of a platform or shared system with internal customers is a strong plus.

• Taste for the user. Strong instincts for what makes a recommendation feel right rather than merely accurate, and a point of view on the failure modes of personalization: filter bubbles, cold start, staleness and creepiness.

• Communication. Excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting technical results and strategy to executives and non-technical audiences.

• Organizational skills. Comfortable with ambiguity, organized, and able to run several workstreams at once across teams with competing priorities.

• Domain. Experience in live events, ticketing, travel, marketplaces or other commerce with time-limited inventory is a plus, as is familiarity with lifecycle prediction, purchase propensity, retention risk or incremental response modeling.

What We Offer:

• Accelerated Growth Environment: An environment designed for swift skill and knowledge enhancement, where you have the autonomy to lead experiments and tests on a massive scale.

• Top Tier Compensation Package: Competitive base, equity, and upside that tracks with your impact.

• Flexible Time Off: Enjoy unlimited Flex Time Off, giving you the flexibility to manage your schedule and take time to recharge as needed.

• Comprehensive Benefits Package: Prioritize your well-being with a comprehensive benefits package, featuring 401k, and premium Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance options.