Sr. Manager, Product Management, Recommendation & Personalization

Position Purpose:

At HomeDepot.com, our award-winning e-Commerce team is blazing a trail of retail shopping innovation by leveraging cutting-edge technology with our 2,200+ store locations and a relentless focus on customer service. We have been named one of the world's most innovative companies and we are on a mission to provide the best interconnected shopping experience to our consumers. To do so, we need more dreamers, innovators and big thinkers passionate about re-imagining the future of retail. Interested in making history with us? If so, apply today to experience what it’s like to be a part of our HomeDepot.com team. Who knows? Your next big idea may just change the future of retail!

We are looking for an innovative, results-oriented, customer-centric and seasoned Senior Manager, Product Management to lead our Recommendations & Personalization team to define, drive and monitor the business on all aspects of demand, customer experience, and conversion. The Senior Manager should be passionate about the customer and the E-commerce industry and have proven results leading a team of product mangers in a fast-paced environment. The successful candidate will recruit, hire, and manage a team of product managers that will evaluate and drive improvements in the overall look, feel, and navigation of customer-facing site aspects, as well as back-end API Personalization and Recommendation data structures for their product areas on Homedepot.com.

The Senior Manager will own the strategic vision and product roadmap for personalization and recommendations of Homedepot.com’s business plan. The candidate will manage a team in defining innovative customer experiences, coordinating with engineering and data science teams to ensure requirements are implemented effectively, and partnering as needed with internal and external business teams to guarantee successful prototyping and product implementations. The candidate will also need to roll up their sleeves as necessary to ensure projects stay on schedule and that the work product meets our high quality bar. Importantly, the candidate must be able to work at the strategic level (generating bold and innovative ideas for growth) and at the tactical level (solving customer pain points).

Major Tasks, Responsibilities and Key Accountabilities:

• 25% Recruit, hire and manage a Product Management team in defining a world-class customer experience that bridges online and multi-channels (in store, mobile, call center, tablet, etc.); Gain a thorough understanding of customer needs, both existing and potential, and use that knowledge as thought leader and customer champion to create product roadmaps with their team which deliver site features that provide Home Depot customers with an unparalleled shopping experience. Inspire and motivate the team; Lead by example and reinforce best practices
• 25% Maintain a product & feature roadmap and manage prioritization and trade-offs among customer experience, site performance and operational support load. Ensure team writes complete & detail-oriented product requirements documents; Ensure clear communications of requirements to the business, design, usability & development teams
• 15% Proactively identify and resolve strategic issues that may impair the team’s ability to meet strategic, financial, and technical goals; As the subject matter expert, forecast, monitor, understand and report on team’s product lines and “own” the overall results
• 15% Create buy-in for their product vision both within the online team and with key enterprise stakeholders; Lead cross-functionally to ensure Home Depot implements the business vision efficiently
• 10% Leverage their thorough understanding of the E-commerce industry, its seasonality and global business trends/events, and competitor/industry developments when managing priorities and trade-offs on their product and feature roadmap
• 10% Identify and assess the value of technology licensing with new vendors to deliver on innovative customer experience features

Nature and Scope:

• Position reports to Sr. Director, Product Management.
• Number of direct reports is 4-8.

Environmental Job Requirements:

Environment:

• Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.

Travel:

• Typically requires overnight travel less than 10% of the time.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Must be eighteen years of age or older.
• Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.

Education Required:

• The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.

Years of Relevant Work Experience: 8+ years

Physical Requirements:

• Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.

Additional Qualifications:

• A strong background (8+ years) in product management or marketing is required, preferably within a consumer goods, retail or internet company
• BA/BS required
• Demonstrated ability to build and manage high-performance product management and prototyping teams
• Strong strategic aptitude; proven ability to define a winning business strategy and product roadmap
• Excellent customer experience intuition; demonstrated success in creating innovative and user-friendly websites and customer-facing features
• Demonstrated ability to manage bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make tradeoffs, balance the business needs versus technical constraints, and maximize business benefit and build great customer experience

• Proven analytical and quantitative skills (experience with excel and access); ability to use hard data and metrics to back up assumptions and feature concepts; comfort with pro-forma financial and operational analysis
• Implementation orientation; demonstrated ability to translate strategic differentiators into innovative and detailed product requirements

• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects across diverse groups, including data science, experience product managers, engineers and QA - work prioritization and planning
• Exceptional interpersonal, communication, cross-collaboration and team skills
• Knowledge of E-commerce business KPIs and technologies

• Ability to deliver initiatives from conception through completion
• Proven ability to make smart feature (customer experience) versus time-to-market trade-offs
• Street smarts and willingness to roll up your sleeve and do what’s necessary

Preferred Qualifications:

• MBA or MS-CIS preferred
• Prior experience leading teams or products focused on personalization and recommendations.
• Demonstrated success building buy-in for an innovative and bold vision
• Technical fluency; comfort understanding and discussing architectural concepts, schedule tradeoffs and new opportunities with technical team members
• Nimbleness and comfort with ambiguity; comfort responding quickly to rapidly evolving threats and opportunities
• Strong bias for action; ability to juggle multiple priorities and create a sense of urgency in a fast-paced, dynamic environment

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Competencies:

• Strong strategic aptitude

• Excellent customer experience intuition; demonstrated success in creating innovative and user-friendly websites and customer-facing features
• Proven track record of taking ownership and driving meaningful results
• Exceptional interpersonal, communication, cross-collaboration and team skills
• Ability to deliver initiatives from conception through completion

• Street smarts and willingness to roll up your sleeve and do what’s necessary