Tigran Bagramyan, Principal Product Manager at Zalando Marketing Services

Principal Product Manager at Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS), Tigran Bagramyan, drives our marketplace domain, the core of our advertising technology. In this short interview, he lets us in on what it’s like to work in this particularly bold and fast-moving unit of Zalando.

Can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers?

I’m a Principal Product Manager at Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS). I own the ad marketplace domain, which is the core of our advertising technology.

What are your current responsibilities?

I lead a team of Product Managers and Project Managers, working on the ad marketplace, which is the backend of our advertising platform. It’s a system that puts the right ad in front of the right customer, at the right time. For example, via the sponsored products in our catalog, homepage collections, and branding campaigns.

We are challenged by the need to improve the monetization efficiency of ads, with a goal to increase our revenue within the next couple of years. We work with advertisers to fulfill their need to connect with shoppers at all stages of the customer journey. We also deliver value to Zalando and ZMS as internal stakeholders by boosting their customer lifetime value and partner lifetime value, which is the marketing budget that partners bring to our platform.

What gives you the most satisfaction in your job?

Specifically with the ads business at Zalando, we are experiencing such huge growth that every decision or action we take leads to major impact on business KPIs. It’s really exciting to immediately see the results and impact of my work. The product team at ZMS is empowered to make important decisions — sometimes bold decisions — and take a lot of ownership and responsibility. ZMS is a separate legal entity from Zalando. I enjoy the fact that it’s smaller, and therefore, more fast moving and horizontal. We all work together towards a common goal.

Who do you work with?

The team is very diverse. There are a lot of different professional backgrounds, including deep tech, machine learning, engineering, business, and design. It’s the nature of a product role to work across multiple functions. Our core stakeholders are the engineering team, the media team (which runs campaigns), partner consultants (the sales team responsible for bringing in partners and creating ad campaigns), the analytics team (which defines our KPIs and metrics, and helps us to test and evaluate every product update we release), and, most importantly, the applied science team.

The Applied Scientists we work with have a key role in helping us to boost sales and customer engagement, or create awareness around a new brand, collection or item. This is all achieved by applying very sophisticated and very modern technologies, like neural networks.

What should a new joiner to your team expect?

They should expect a very high level of ownership and responsibility. We tend to give a lot of freedom in decision making to Product Managers. We are looking for people who are bold enough to make important decisions, to autonomously drive very complex projects, and to lead and motivate multiple teams — all without a formal authority. It’s a challenge, but I believe it’s a super-exciting environment for Product Managers.

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