Senior Business Analyst Best Message Cross Channel in Utrecht

Bol.com is changing retail to make daily life simpler for 11 million Dutch and Belgian customers. We are joined on this mission by 39,000 partner sellers that do business on our retail tech platform. With our combined assortment of approximately 30 million articles, you could window shop for years! But what we really want, is to help our customers quickly find the perfect products for them. This might sound easy, but it does mean we have to know what those products are, preferably before customers do.

Our ambition is to truly understand customers and to know what customers are looking for. That’s what it’ll take to direct customers to the right products and provide optimally relevant information. Is that goal even possible? If you’re a member of bol.com’s largest innovation team, your answer is ‘of course!’. We’re in the business of making wishes come true. What’s more, we have the means to achieve it. The Customer Core Tech teams are staffed by ambitious product owners, business analysts, data scientists and engineers who work together to help our other teams make customer interactions increasingly relevant and meaningful.

Together with the Product Owner, you are the liaison between business stakeholders and the scrum team. Your work starts with a thorough analysis of business requests. What problems do they think they’re trying to solve? What are the actual problems? Can we deliver solutions? And, if so, should we? To paraphrase George Orwell: all solutions are equal, but some solutions are more equal than others. For example, because they add more business or customer value. You’ll often work on business issues, but we also expect you to occasionally skinny dip in an ocean of data, go pearl hunting, and translate your new insights into your own improvement and innovation proposals. Formulate hypotheses to prove or disprove assumptions. Build proofs of concepts and set up tests. Analyze test results for ideas to further improve our services. You’ll work closely with the Product Owner in this role. Together, you inspire and support the IT teams. E.g. by developing user stories that end on a positive note. As for your projects, let us introduce you to team ‘Best Message X-channel’ (four developers, two Data Scientists, one interim Tester, a Product Owner and an interim Business Analyst), code-named BMX:

Team BMX is responsible for:
implementing and integrating the Next Best Message Machine, which involves 3rd party technology & machine learning
using machine learning to maintain and improve personal recommendations
in the near future also responsible for optimizing the page layout in our store

Because you’re a natural-born problem solver. You already know that finding the best solutions starts with asking the right people the right questions. Here we follow that up with rigorous data crunching. We embrace a hypothesis-based way of working and challenge you to come up with multiple scenarios to solve any given problem. We expect a desire to experiment, and that you are versed in setting up and conducting tests. Analytical and data crunching qualities aside, this role calls for strong communication skills as in being able to easily switch between business and IT, and proven ‘story writing’ capabilities: the clearer and more concise your stories, the happier the scum teams will be. Proactivity and strong stakeholder management qualities are also required, in combination with a goal-driven attitude and presentation skills.