Group Product Manager - Ims And Customer Care (Toronto, On)

Reporting to the Senior Director of Product Management, the Group Product Manager (GPM) holds a critical role within the SSENSE Product team. Working on Operations Technology B2B2C products Inventory Management Systems, Customer Service systems) the GPM, will be acting as the heart, mind, and voice of our customers, supporting the business. They will help determine the product vision for their group of products or Domain and will directly manage a team of Product Managers.

The Group Product Manager will be operating in an ambitious and exciting time, supporting our international growth with scalable technologies to best engage our customers. The ideal candidate will have the opportunity to work with Product Managers, Developers, Data Engineers, and Data Scientists, building a portfolio of products, managing an innovative product roadmap, and leading the end-to-end execution of all product related initiatives.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Product & Program Delivery - 40% time

• Support any product, tech department or company-wide initiatives, when need be
• Rigorously focus on Data Driven Product Management, infuse this thinking across teams in various aspects of the product craft incl. roadmap building, launching, product discovery
• Collaborate with cross-functional domains: product team members of different domains, Business Partners and Senior Engineers (Staff, Architects, Engineer Directors and Application Managers), to ensure (but not limited to) focus and alignment on the product vision, needle moving initiatives, to unblock certain topics, to ensure the product manager can focus on product discovery and launches
• Communicate clearly on how each product manager and product contributes to the vision and the role they play
• Lead Product Managers to focus the product roadmap on the largest needle moving initiatives and guide the end-to-end implementation of products and features
• Support their product managers when needed on their scope (competitive analysis, new budget asks) and drive buy vs build analysis and decisions (RFPs)
• Engage in tough conversations and raise flags when needed to be able to move things forward ensure clear and transparent communication and adapted to different groups

Product & Program Strategy - 30% time

• Serve as product evangelist, thought leader, and subject matter expert both internally and externally on their product domain
• Establish scorecard metrics and identify KPI and KPO’s for each product as their north star. Identify how to capture the data and track these, to be able to report on them regularly and to help guide teams roadmaps decisions
• Stay abreast of the latest trends in technology, e-commerce, retail, and fashion, buying and planning including AI/ML
• Contribute to the overall product practice and tech department in various ways (tech culture, Communities of practice…)
• Provide visibility to senior leadership, to their team and to other internal members on strategy, plan, updates, call-outs
• Oversee the Inventory Management and Customer Service domain which includes a portfolio of products (Inventory management system, Inter-company Transfers, Customer Service Platforms, Agent experience), defining the vision, strategy and execution plan, incl. options, illustrating how each product contributes to the overall goal, as well as working and supporting each product managers to do the same for their specific product
• Act as an owner on the product portfolio managed, and infuse this sense of accountability to their team by being rigorously outcome focused and customer satisfaction driven
• Present new budget asks through business cases, modeling assumptions and estimated desired impacts
• Raise the bar by initiating improvement on the product craft (tools, processes, structure…)

People Leadership & Coaching - 30 %

• Be involved in product staffing and team structure to best deliver value
• 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's are engaged towards achieving the department's missions
• Assess current and future team resource needs while developing talent that can scale with the needs of the business
• Lead a group of Product Managers and set clear guidance and expectations to empower each team member to best oversee their product or product scope and ensure accountability
• Able to guide team members to go deep into the details on multiple topics, step in when needed or, then simplify communications
• Retain, attract and grow product managers (coach, training) and team
• Coach product managers to deepen their product discovery, assess impact and measure at launch
• Provide mentorship and development opportunities to team members, catalyzing growth through coaching and team building
• Work with Senior Leadership to gauge and monitor team engagement and implement solutions to create a transparent, collaborative and productive work environment

REQUIREMENTS

• Experience working within an Agile environment, an asset
• Experience in cross-functional collaboration with Business, Sales, Finance, Operations, and Technology teams including Data Science, Data Engineer and Developers
• Master's degree, MBA, MSc., PhD an asset
• A minimum of 7 years relevant work experience
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in French and English
• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Proven track record of leveraging data, data analytics and assumption / scenario modeling to identify issues/opportunities, provide recommendations, and illustrate to facilitate decision making
• A minimum of 2 years experience in managing teams of professionals to deliver complex projects
• Previous experience in Inventory Management system and/or Customer service platforms - either in the e-commerce, Retail or Consulting Industry
• A minimum of 2 years experience in managing teams of professionals to deliver complex projects
• Experience in high impact projects at a global scale and managing growth in a complex and changing environment

SKILLS

• Ability to lead high performing teams to deliver outstanding results
• Strong communication written and verbal
• Entrepreneurial, solution oriented, hands on, get stuff done attitude
• Highly analytical and detail oriented
• Strong ability to think critically, problem solve and prioritize
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, performance-driven environment
• Comfortable in operating in ambiguous, changing landscape
• Ability to define a product strategy and drive a team to deliver on their potential
• Strong stakeholder management skills and ability to lead by influence across functional teams
• Ability to dive deep into the details, document or capture findings and simplify complex topics
• Strong business acumen and technical understanding

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 SSENSETech Blog.