Director of Product Management - Buying Journey & Pricing

This is a remote role, employees are welcome to work near any of our principal location hubs: Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, Dallas and NYC

SSENSE (pronounced [es-uhns]) is a global technology platform operating at the intersection of culture, community, and commerce. Headquartered in Montreal, it features a mix of established and emerging luxury brands across womenswear, menswear, kidswear, and Everything Else.

SSENSE has garnered critical acclaim as both an e-commerce engine and a producer of cultural content, generating an average of 100 million monthly page views. Approximately 80% of its audience is between the ages of 18 to 40. It is privately held and has achieved high double digit annual growth and profitability since its inception.

Reporting to the Senior Director of Product Management, the Director of Product Management holds a critical role within the SSENSE Product team.  They will be managing Group Product Managers and Product Managers of different seniority, who are responsible for the execution of all product initiatives of a domain. The goal of the domain is to improve product sell-through, where the focus is both on improving product assortment (the buying team’s journey) and pricing (base price, shipping, duties, taxes, promotions) both through building avant-garde platforms, automation and data driven tools infused w/ ML/AI. Tools will be both B2B and B2C. Interacting closely with senior leaders, the Director of Product Management and their team act as the heart, mind, and voice of our customer, managing an ambitious product roadmap, and leading the execution of all product initiatives relative to his/her domains to ensure that SSENSE delivers a world-class shopping experience - acting as owners and accountable for its success. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

Product Vision   - 40%

• Set the Product vision for the product buying & pricing domains in collaboration with cross functional stakeholders, executive committee sponsors, and brand partners

• Lead Group Product Managers and Product Managers to set the vision, strategy and execution plan for their product families, delivering through others

• Influencing various business partners, set the product buying journey and pricing strategy and it’s various facets by building platforms, tools, data flows and automation, to increase pricing transparency and to continuously assess the impact, hence ensuring platform performance, data accuracy and reliability

• Establish the buying platforms and pricing domain roadmaps, successfully dealing with uncertainty, complex dependencies, difficult trade-offs and time pressure, making difficult decisions and obtaining consensus with stakeholders while using a rigorous and data-driven approach

• Establish and ensure that  business and system performance objectives are defined, measured and met (e.g. contribution margin optimization, microservices performance, data consistency, etc.)

People Leadership - 40%

• Work with Managers to ensure retention and staffing targets are being met

• Build and maintain high performing teams

• Hold weekly one-on-ones, conduct performance reviews, analyze individual KPIs and assess promotion readiness to help each contributor evolve in their roles

• Ensure team mobilization by regularly gauging team engagement and implementing appropriate means to create a transparent, collaborative and productive work environment

• Identify current gaps within the team/department structure and work with Senior Leadership on resourcing plans

• Establish the resource plan for the direct team

• Establish the short term objectives for the department and ensure team's are engaged towards achieving the department's missions

• Coach and mentor domain product managers to have them excel in their role

• Enforce the Tech Department's mission, vision and themes throughout the teams

Product Delivery - 20%

• Responsible and accountable for the product domain and its impact (pricing performance, transparency, etc.)

• Leading Group Product Managers and internal partners (engineering et design) through the end-to-end implementation of Products and features while ensuring accountability at all levels and a detailed understanding of the current and desired state of the product(s) from both a business and technical perspective

• Establish a culture of delivering impact through data driven product roadmaps, through accountability by ensuring team members adopt a detailed understanding of the technology, data flows & use cases of the products managed and through openness and transparency by fostering cross collaboration efforts

• Set, track and communicate KPIs for the designated Product area in order to provide a single point of contact between Product, Technology and Business units

• Annually align domains KPIs and KPOs with CEO scorecard as well as partners scorecards; put in place reporting mechanisms to track progress 

• Role-out product management best practices amd ensure company standards are met through the leadership of their managers across the team.

• Act as an ambassador of the overall product practice at the department level through various ways (tech culture, Communities of practice…)

• Lead or sponsor various department-wide or company wide initiatives (Sell-through optimization, Promotion, etc.)

• Stay abreast of the latest trends in technology, e-commerce, retail, and fashion, buying and planning including AI/ML to elevate the product discovery work

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, Master's degree an asset

• MBA from a leading academic institution or strategy consulting experience, an asset

• A minimum of 8 years relevant work experience, developing software or managing digital Products and technologies (e.g. Website, Retail, Mobile APP, POS technology, Pricing, B2B tools, Operations)

• Prior experience in Retail Pricing, Consulting Pricing or Category Management

• Experience in high impact projects at a global scale and managing growth in a complex and changing environment 

• Proven track record of leveraging data, data analytics and assumption / scenario modeling to identify issues/opportunities, provide recommendations and illustrate to facilitate decision making

• Experience in cross-functional collaboration with Business, Sales, Finance, Operations, and Technology teams including Data Science, Data Engineer and Developers

• A minimum of 2 years experience in managing teams of professionals to deliver complex projects

• Experience working within an Agile environment, an asset

• Technology background, with a strong understanding of business and dynamics of products, customers, industry & markets 

• Successful track record leading high performing teams to deliver outstanding results

• Strong English and French written and verbal communication skills

COMPETENCY

• Ability to lead high performing teams to deliver outstanding results

• Ability to dive deep into the details, document or capture findings and simplify complex topics

• Strong ability to think critically, problem solve, solution oriented and prioritize

• Highly analytical and detail oriented

• Comfortable in operating in ambiguous, changing landscape, thrives in a fast-paced, performance-driven environment 

• Strong business acumen,  technical understanding and entrepreneurial drive; “get stuff done attitude”

• Strong communication written and verbal 

• Strong stakeholder management skills and ability to lead by influence across functional teams

• Ability to define a Product strategy and drive a team to deliver on their potential

• Ability to simplify complexity

WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY 

Technology is at the core of everything we do at SSENSE. Driven by an engineering mindset and a problem-solving attitude, we blend fashion with technology to deliver an unparalleled experience to our customers as we build seamless, custom solutions to deliver the SSENSE offering. 

WORLD CLASS TEAM

The SSENSE tech team is responsible for an international headless commerce platform. Working in an agile environment, our squads are made up of experienced innovators in Product Management, QA, Design, DevOps, Software Development, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Security. Headquartered in Montreal, our technology organization has been growing at a rate of 2X year-over-year and is doubling once again in 2021 as we expand across Canada, US, and Europe.  

WORLD CLASS PLATFORM 

The SSENSE platform runs on Amazon Web Services making use of serverless microservices across web, mobile and app. Our event-source architecture already achieves over 10,000 requests / second and growing at an unmatched pace, currently unseen across the industry.  Our data-driven culture of innovation empowers every product team across the tech organization to explore building, testing and learning with the latest in Machine Learning techniques. Our automated continuous improvement DevOps model (making use of both blue / green and canary deployments) results in an average of 50 production releases every day.  

Read more about us on our SSENSE Tech Blog.