Product Manager ( Digital Customer & Commercial)

Purpose and Mission

Bekaert is leading transformation program to enhance the customer experience end-to-end and deliver customer journeys that drive impact across multiple channels. Bekaert’s customers across the value chain are getting increasingly sophisticated and expect a seamless and well-designed customer experience. Bekaert teams measure impact of various solutions on customer experience and drive change through new and remodeled journey-based experience solutions. Bekaert organization is reviewing the success and performance of these end-to-end customer journey through data analytics across the journey.

Your task as Product Manager for Digital Customer and Commercial is to increase the Bekaert's success by building and deploying Sales, Commerce and Marketing digital and technology solutions. The spectrum of your task’s ranges from innovative product solutions to optimising the efficiency of existing products. You will collaborate with Solution architect and will lead scrum teams to develop visions, build and deploy solutions on customer experience and excellence. You will work in close co-operation with teams from other IT, Digital, Commercial Excellence and various Business Units across multiple regions.

As Product Manager for Customer and Commercial Solutions, you lead the “voice of the product” by setting the overall strategic vision and roadmap for the product. You are accountable for succeeding against identified metrics, managing ROI of the product, and setting short- and long-term product goals as well as ensuring the product team is effectively working together. You will work, above all strategically, to form a powerful team and ensure the success of the commercial functions at Bekaert. You co-own product responsibilities with the product owners, solution architects and identifies technology solutions to meet business and financial objectives. You will own the lifecycle of CRM and Commercial Analytics platforms, ensuring they evolve as scalable, value-generating enterprise assets.

You will collaborate closely with Business Analysts, Digital Solution Managers, Architects, Tech Leads, Scrum Masters, and Business stakeholders to deliver structured, value-driven product execution within a complex, cross-functional enterprise environment. The ideal candidate combines strong domain expertise (CRM, Pricing, Commercial KPIs) with digital delivery excellence in Agile environments and the ability to influence senior stakeholders.

Key Activities and Responsibilities

Strategic & Portfolio Ownership
• Partner with the Business Leads for defining and implementing the Digital Customer & Commercial roadmap for your product tracks. You will also be responsible in streamlining the product operations in alignment with the business objectives of the organisation.
• Work collaboratively across business and technology to build good understanding of strategic objectives for commercial products, identifies business outcomes, explores implications, impacts, and risks, and stakeholders’ priorities.
• Define and own the product vision and multi-year roadmap for CRM and Commercial Analytics platforms aligned with Enterprise and BU strategy.
• Drive value-based prioritization grounded in business case, ROI, and strategic impact.
• Own portfolio trade-off decisions to ensure optimal allocation of digital investments.
• Establish clear success metrics across adoption, quality, and commercial impact layers.
• Lead governance forums (including Leadership SteerCos) to align stakeholders on roadmap, risks, dependencies, and value realization.
• Monitor run cost vs. realized value and actively support BU discussions on digital ROI.
• Ensure digital investments are aligned with defined business value realization targets.
• Build a world-class Digital Engineering teams. Develop team capabilities and manage deployment to provide customer-focused design and implementation support.
• Govern third-party vendor performance and drive accountability through defined KPIs and SLAs.

CRM Platform Ownership (Microsoft Dynamics 365)
• Drive CRM process maturity across Lead-to-Opportunity, Account Planning, and Pipeline Analytics.
• Partner with Business Units to transform commercial objectives into scalable CRM capabilities.
• Monitor CRM performance, gather business insights, and drive continuous enhancement.
• Ensure strong adoption through structured change management and enablement strategies.
• Convert CRM strategy into prioritized backlog, epics, and release plans working with delivery teams.
• Ensure delivery excellence with clear release planning, execution and dependency management.
• Act as a strategic bridge between Commercial & SAP Product Managers, BU Product Owners, Regional Champions, and end users to enhance scalability and usage.

Pricing & Commercial Analytics Ownership
• Lead implementation and evolution of Pricing Optimization and Commercial Analytics capabilities.
• Establish KPI frameworks covering pricing realization, margin, pipeline visibility, and commercial performance.
• Drive data-driven decision-making through impactful dashboards and advanced commercial analytics. Identify process and data gaps, driving structured improvement initiatives.
• Partner with data engineering teams to ensure reliable, scalable data foundations and integrations
• Promote best practices in commercial analytics and self-service BI adoption.
• Ensure Analytics Dashboards deliver actionable insights that translate into measurable business outcomes to our Commercial and Finance leaders
• Strengthen stakeholder relationships to improve adoption and maximize value realization.

Essential Skills & Competencies

Skills
•    Breadth and Depth in knowledge of various aspects of an enterprise and customer oriented technology architecture like business, information, data, infrstructure and security 
•    10+ years of overall experience, with 7+ years in product /program management of CRM and Enterprise Commercial Analytics Platforms.
•    Good understanding of design thinking, Agile product delivery methodologies, test-driven development, and modern software delivery practices. Strong experience owning product roadmap, backlog prioritization, and release governance.
•    Good Experience with CRM platforms (Microsoft Dynamics 365 preferred).
•    Good Experience with Pricing, Commercial Analytics, and Commercial & Financial KPI frameworks.
•    Good analytical, planning, organizational and technical skills. Be a voice of reason and command authority to make tough calls. Experience leading executive governance forums (SteerCo).
•    Strong financial acumen and demonstrated business case ownership.
•    Strong stakeholder influencing and escalation management capability.
•    Good written and verbal communication skills
•    Ability to work within an IT organization in an in-and-out outsourced environment

Competencies
•    Organizationally savvy, with the ability to navigate organizational politics. 
•    Ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences
•    Ability to understand the long-term ("big picture") and short-term perspectives of situations
•    Ability to translate future-state business capabilities and requirements into solution requirements
•    Ability to propose and estimate the financial impact of solution alternatives
•    Ability to work creatively and analytically to solve business problems and propose solutions
•    Ability to quickly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies
•    Ability to assess product quality and other non-functional attributes and provide recommendations
•    Ability to deliver an exceptional customer service, employee satisfaction and greater service/delivery maturity with evolving business and technology landscape

Who you are
•    You are a leader and an entrepreneur that people willingly follow
•    Great people skills paired with a high level of assertiveness
•    Displays intellectual curiosity and integrity
•    Motivated and driven by achieving long-term business outcomes
•    High level motivational skills so that you can also manage virtual teams