Solution Discovery & Guided Buying Journeys

How will you shape our tomorrow 

Sonepar is transforming from a classic B2B eCommerce platform into an intelligent omnichannel commerce ecosystem. 

Our customers do not come to our eCommerce platform to browse. They come with a job to do: identify the right product, validate a technical choice, check availability, reorder efficiently, prepare project purchases, and buy with confidence. 

We are looking for a Product Manager who understands B2B commerce beyond features and screens. Someone who can connect customer behavior, commercial reality, operational complexity, and digital experience into one coherent product direction. 

This role is not about managing a backlog only. It is about understanding how customers buy, how OpCos operate, how value is created, and how Spark can help customers make better and faster decisions. 

An Experience That Drives Confidence 

As Product Manager Solution Discovery & Guided Buying Journeys, you will shape the business and customer experience direction for how customers discover, validate, select, and buy products across Spark. 

You will own the customer-facing discovery and guided buying experience across: 

• Searchbox and query interaction experience 

• Search results page experience, sorting, filtering, and refinement 

• Product detail page and decision support 

• Favorites, reorders, project lists, and previously purchased products 

• Pre-purchase availability and delivery promise communication 

• Recommendations and contextual product suggestions 

• TechClarity as conversational guidance across the journey 

• Guided selling and assisted buying journeys 

You will work in close partnership with the teams owning search ranking, retrieval, relevance logic, data models, and technical search infrastructure. 

Your mission is to reduce customer effort, increase buying confidence, accelerate repeat purchasing, and improve commercial performance. 

Key Responsibilities 

Understand the customer and the business 

• Build a deep understanding of how B2B customers search, decide, reorder, prepare projects, and buy. 

• Translate customer problems, OpCo realities, and commercial priorities into clear product choices. 

• Identify where Spark can remove friction, save time, reduce mistakes, and increase conversion. 

• Understand the difference between a feature request and a real business opportunity. 

• Challenge solutions that do not clearly improve customer value, business impact, or operational scalability. 

• Connect customer needs with business outcomes such as conversion, adoption, order efficiency, customer effort, and revenue contribution.

Shape the product direction 

• Define the product vision for solution discovery and guided buying journeys. 

• Own the roadmap across customer-facing discovery, PDP, lists, reorders, recommendations, TechClarity, and guided buying. 

• Prioritize based on customer value, business impact, scalability, and evidence. 

• Ensure the roadmap supports Spark’s evolution toward intelligent, context-aware commerce. 

• Create alignment between global platform ambition and local OpCo needs. 

• Translate business priorities into clear product direction, measurable outcomes, and practical execution choices. 

Improve customer-facing search and product discovery 

• Own the customer-facing search and discovery experience, including searchbox interaction, search results layout, sorting, filtering, refinement, and product discovery flows. 

• Translate customer search behavior, friction points, and business priorities into clear experience requirements. 

• Ensure search outcomes are understandable, usable, trusted, and commercially effective for customers. 

• Improve discoverability of relevant, previously purchased, alternative, and recommended products across the journey. 

• Ensure the discovery experience supports both fast repeat buying and more complex product & solution selection journeys. 

Strengthen PDP and decision support 

• Evolve the PDP from a product information page into a decision-support experience. 

• Define how product data, availability, delivery promise, documentation, alternatives, recommendations, and TechClarity support customer decisions. 

• Ensure customers can quickly answer: Is this the right product? Is it available? When can I receive it?  What else do I need? Is there a better or more relevant alternative? 

• Improve decision confidence by connecting product information with customer context, previous purchases, availability, and business rules. 

Support repeat and project-based buying 

• Own the customer experience for favorites, reorders, project lists, and list management. 

• Make repeat buying faster, easier, and more reliable. 

• Improve visibility of previously purchased products across the buying journey. 

• Connect lists with availability, recommendations, project preparation, quote flows, and buying journeys. 

• Support customers who buy repeatedly, work with standard product sets, or prepare project-based purchases. 

• Ensure lists become more than storage: they should help customers prepare, validate, organize, and buy more efficiently. 

Guide customers through complexity 

• Define how TechClarity and guided buying should support customers across the journey. 

• Identify where Spark should explain options, ask questions, recommend products, support complex decisions, or guide customers toward the next best action. 

• Own the customer-facing trigger points, UX flow, entry points, exits, fallbacks, and handover logic. 

• Ensure conversational guidance is trusted, useful, and grounded in reliable product, customer, availability, and business context. 

• Help Spark move from product display toward guided decision support. 

Define recommendation placement and business value 

• Define where and how recommendations appear across the customer journey. 

• Ensure recommendations support customer efficiency first, with cross-sell and upsell as secondary value outcomes. 

• Align recommendations with customer intent, journey stage, product context, previous purchases, availability, and business priorities. 

• Measure recommendation relevance, engagement, conversion, and commercial contribution. 

Turn insight into impact 

• Lead discovery before development capacity is requested. 

• Use customer research, behavioral analytics, OpCo input, sales feedback, support signals, and operational data to validate opportunities. 

• Build clear problem statements, hypotheses, prototypes, business cases, and success metrics. 

• Separate assumptions from evidence and make product decisions based on validated learning. 

• Measure post-launch impact and translate learnings into roadmap decisions. 

• Ensure product investments are linked to measurable customer and business outcomes. 

What this role does not own directly 

• This role does not directly own the technical search engine, ranking algorithms, retrieval logic, relevance tuning, indexing strategy, or infrastructure. 

• These capabilities are owned in partnership with dedicated Search, Data, AI, and Engineering teams. 

• This role owns the business understanding, customer-facing experience, product direction, customer problems, opportunity framing, success metrics, and business impact of the discovery and guided buying journey. 

The experience you bring 

• Strong understanding of B2B commerce, digital commerce, product discovery, search experience, or complex buying journeys. 

• Ability to understand customer behavior, business processes, commercial drivers, operational constraints, … . 

• Experience translating business problems into product direction, priorities, and measurable outcomes. 

• Strong analytical mindset with the ability to use behavioral data, search analytics, conversion metrics, customer feedback, and business input. 

• Good understanding of search experience, filters, PDP, recommendations, reordering, lists, guided selling, and assisted buying journeys. 

• Ability to work with UX, Research, Analytics, Engineering, Data, AI, Product Data and OpCo stakeholders. 

• Strong discovery skills: problem framing, hypothesis, prototyping, business-case creation, and validation. 

• Understanding of how AI and conversational guidance can improve customer journeys. 

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills in an international matrix organization. 

• Pragmatic mindset: strategic enough to shape direction, business-oriented enough to prioritize impact, and operational enough to drive progress. 

Recruitment Process 

• Interview with HR 

• Interview with VP Customer Experience 

• Interview with SVP Omni-Channel Experience and Business Process Transformation