Business Analyst Offer Highway

About bol

Bol is the largest online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Position

How do you make our customers happy?

Bol.com is changing retail to make daily life simpler for 12 million Dutch and Belgian customers. We are joined on this mission by 42,000 partner sellers that do business on our retail tech platform. This represents a combined assortment of 28 million products and growing daily. So every aspect of our platform needs to be scalable and reliable. This includes our Offer Highway – the process by which we gather, combine, analyze and evaluate product information, prices and delivery options: information we need to know to present customers with relevant propositions. A mission-critical process, because if the Offer Highway is congested or ‘closed down’, partners can’t sell and customers can’t buy. As for the scope: our team processes ~20 million offers per day.

The biggest challenge

Because bol.com is an open retail platform, we need to actively maximize its appeal to customers and partners alike. We want to inspire partners to improve their offers (assortment, pricing, fulfillment) continually, and help them become more successful. In the process, this will help boost customer satisfaction to new heights. We also need to safeguard a level playing field. Given the sheer number of products on offer, and the volume of updates (products, prices, delivery options), this is by necessity a highly automated process. Considering this volume, the exponential growth rate and the daily tsunami of changes, how can we ensure matchmaking quality? As Product Owner Offer Highway, you manage the crucial backbone of our retail tech platform, so that 42k partners and 12m customers can expect ‘matches made in heaven’.

What you do as Business Analyst Offer Highway

As Business Analyst at Offer Highway, you maximize our product’s impact on customers, partners and other platform consumers. You won’t face this challenge alone, but with a team of 9 business analysts and product owners and alongside four scrum teams. Our joint ambition: deliver scalable and robust innovations for our consumers that land safely in a complex IT landscape. As Business Analyst you will work towards (1) co-creating scalable and reliable offer processes, (2) providing the means to stimulate good partner behavior, (3) while making sure every platform player – including bol.com – operates on a level playing field. Competition is beneficial. An unfair advantage is not. The setting is a high-tech cloud environment that has to perform reliably. Even on Black Friday.

Current challenges include

• Ensuring partner propositions strike the right balance between price, delivery time and partner reliability
• Providing partners with actionable feedback so they can improve the quality of their offers
• Preparing the Offer Highway for future growth – both in the number of partners and products, and their relative share of platform transactions
• Enabling other products to innovate, e.g., by ensuring we can easily add platform policies and services to our portfolio

Why you can make a difference

Because after completing your master’s degree, you worked in comparable Agile/Scrum settings and/or a similar industry. You have an analytical mindset and are not afraid to dive deep to answer complex questions and formulate hypotheses. Given the complexity of the bol.com landscape, affinity with IT and Big Data, plus a big heart for both, are indispensable. That also goes for a talent to connect and inspire people. Heartfelt support for your ideas is a main impact driver!
To be successful, it’s imperative that you have an interest/affinity for back-end processes and are as excited about data driven decision making and data modelling as we are. If you are accustomed to solving problems with off-the-shelf solutions, this may not be the career highway you want to take. After all, we built the Offer Highway from scratch and continue to develop it in-house. That calls for strong conceptual qualities on your part.
To top it off, you are an inspiring and committed colleague and a valuable sparring partner.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

+ Yes, if you have an academic background, topped off with a minimum of 2 years of relevant work experience
+ Yes, if your track record shows you know how to leverage data for value, and are not afraid to experiment
+ Yes, if you can vigorously substantiate your ideas and create traction with contagious enthusiasm
- No, if you cannot zoom-out far enough to see the big picture and if you cannot zoom-in deep enough to make sense of complex issues
- No, if you have many talents, but stakeholder management isn’t one of them
- No, if you have no affinity with complex business processes and are secretly scared of technology

Colleagues speaking

At the premier online retail tech platform in the Netherlands and Belgium. A platform where 12 million Dutch and Belgian customers can choose from over 28 million articles. A platform that helps 42,000 commercial partners run their businesses. And a platform that will never be ‘finished’, because bol.com has been reinventing retail since 1999. And we always will be. If there’s a better way to do something, we’re working on it! Together with our customers, partners, and over 2,200 colleagues. And hopefully together with you. Let’s change retail together to make every day of our customers’ life easier.