Senior Product Owner (m/w/d)

At Pflegia we build and operate an intelligent job matching platform that brings caregivers and healthcare employers together. Our vision is to become Europe's leading job platform for nursing professions and to fight the nursing crisis.
We are past the build-it phase. The constraint is no longer whether we can ship — it is deciding which of twenty possible things actually moves hires. That decision is the job. Become part of the team and shape the nursing job market with us.
Tasks
What You'll Do
* Own the matching funnel end to end — invite, accepted match, transferred match, interview, hire. Every step is measured today and every step leaks.
* Analyze business requirements and break them down into roadmaps, timelines, epics, tickets and tasks — and defend the cut list.
* Document, analyze and improve the whole user journey on both sides of the marketplace: candidates and employers have competing interests, and those trade-offs are yours to make rather than escalate.
* Create actionable concepts for new products and features, estimate effort and ROI, own the process from ideation to delivery.
* Decide where AI belongs and where it does not. Run experiments with the expected outcome written down first, then verify and iterate.
* Define KPIs, track them, improve them, revise them. Within 90 days we expect one metric you moved, with a baseline, a number, and a read you can defend to the leadership team.
* Collaborate with stakeholders, developers and the data team, and use data-driven storytelling to align them.
Requirements
Must have
* 5+ years in Product Ownership/Management, shipping with cross-functional agile teams.
* Experience building or scaling marketplaces, job boards, or recruitment platforms — two-sided funnels behave differently and we would rather not teach that from scratch.
* Data-driven by default: you write your own analytics questions, read an experiment result, and say "this did not work" out loud. Analytics, A/B testing, experimentation and you can name a business number your product work moved, its baseline, and why you picked that problem over the next one.
* Technical depth: you have worked closely with engineers on complex products and can read, question and push back on an architecture, an API contract or a data flow. Engineering trade-offs are product decisions you make, not ones you hand on.
* Strong ability to define product vision, roadmaps and priorities against business goals, customer needs and technical constraints — including clear epics, user stories and acceptance criteria for complicated workflows and funnels.
* Excellent written German and English. Our users, employers and support team are German-speaking; our codebase and documentation are English.
Nice to have
* Search and SEO, including the AI-answer variants (AIEO, AEO, GEO) — a growing share of our traffic.
* Matching or recommendation systems: you know why offline metrics and business metrics disagree.
* Healthcare hiring workflows and empathy for the field — shift work, qualification recognition, and why a nurse does not read email at 14:00.
* SQL. Not required, but the people who enjoy this role usually have it.
Benefits
* Decision authority. Flat hierarchies with short decision paths are not a slogan here: you will not need a committee to ship, and you will not get to blame one either.
* Direct access to the data — our own data lake, dashboards and product analytics. You query it yourself instead of filing a ticket and waiting.
* Budget and room for experiments that are allowed to fail, provided the expected outcome was defined up front.
* Regular feedback conversations with empathic and experienced leadership.
* An open corporate culture with helpful, communicative colleagues and a genuinely cooperative working atmosphere.
* Central Berlin office in a beautiful old building, plus flexible remote