Advisor, Product Management - Merchandise Financial Planning

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Job description

About:

Macy's is proudly America's Department Store. For more than 160 years, Macy's has served generations at every stage of their lives. Customers come to us for fashion, value and celebration.

Macy's Merchandising curates the best national and private brands to support our customer's self-expression from off-price to luxury. Merchandising ensures Macy's is the premier fashion authority using a high acumen for products and trends as well as strong relationships with vendors in the marketplace. Our team maximizes sales and gross margin for each product category by identifying, procuring, and assorting the products that our customers demand.

Do you have an eye for products and trends? Join Macy's Merchandising and create connections that surprise and delight our customers at every turn.

Overview of Role.

At Macy's our Product Management teams build and define products that allow Macy's customers to shop seamlessly across channels and for our colleagues and vendor partners to work efficiently and effectively - all driving toward delighting our customers, driving colleague engagement, and maximizing business KPIs. A Product Manager defines the most critical user problems to solve, impact of target business outcomes, and a vision for how we can leverage technology to solve those problems, drive those outcomes, and maximize ROI of our invested capital.

Our Product Managers leverage their passion for building great products by partnering with tech, analytics, UX, and functional/business SMEs in an Agile & Lean product delivery environment throughout the entire product lifecycle - from strategic planning through tactical execution and post-launch measurement.

The current opening is part of a team that is driving Macy's into the future by standing up a new Enterprise Product Catalogue with a third party. This new catalogue will be the single source of truth for item level data across the Macy's Inc. enterprise. The ideal candidate will have experience with Macy's item and vendor data structures and understand the business process of creating and managing item data at Macy's. The individual must have experience managing and helping to influence stakeholders across the enterprise to drive the project forward to deliver a best in class product.

Key Responsibilities. The Product Manager's responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• User centered ideation & discovery
  • Customer research to develop empathy, identify critical problems to solve, expectations, behaviors, mental models, decision-making approach, etc.
  • Business stakeholder interviews to understand operational complexities, strategic objectives and plans, impacts and considerations, etc.
  • Analysis of quant & qual data (internal and external) to aid in prioritization
  • Analysis of competitive landscape, and recommendation for positioning within
  • Analysis of industry trends and emerging opportunities, and how they are shifting customer expectations
  • Technology partnership to evaluate technical constraints, complexities, & capabilities
  • Financial modeling for ROI analysis
  • Strategic roadmap development - near & long term vision that will drive iterative value
  • Storytelling & socialization of product - with business & technology stakeholders
• User centered scope definition & prioritization
  • Use cases, journey mapping, hypothesis development
  • Breaking down product vision into a release strategy (slices of scope that allow us to deliver iterativelyà minimizing tech risk, getting user validation sooner, test & learn, delivering value sooner - for customer and business)
  • Analysis of quant & qual data (internal and external) to drive alignment around prioritized problems to solve, outcomes to drive, rather than merely a list of features
  • Partnering with UX to define IA (information architecture) and CS (content strategy) of new/changing user experience
  • Identification of KPIs, engagement & operational metrics for each slice of scope
• Stakeholder management
  • Navigate complexities of cross-brand/cross-channel/cross-division/cross-functional stakeholder landscape - leveraging expertise and driving alignment & engagement amongst sponsor, business owner(s), working group, and other senior stakeholders.
  • Interviews, facilitation of working group, 1:1s, group showcase forums, etc. - driving alignment and uncovering operational and organizational impacts, coordinating business readiness activities, considering business process impacts & dependencies, and driving product training & transfer of ownership
• Agile product delivery
  • Partners with Iteration Manager, Tech Lead, QA, and engineers to continuously improve and maximize output of delivery team
  • Effectively builds & prioritizes user stories for each iterative delivery - partnering with UX, tech, QA, business SMEs to deliver each
  • Maintains outcome focus by adjusting product roadmap, release strategy, & scope priorities based on realities of an agile environment - constantly uncovering more information in technical, business, customer, and data areas
• Product Hindsighting
  • Partners with analytics team to develop & implement test strategy to validate key hypotheses at appropriate, iterative points in time throughout iterative delivery.
  • Measures impact of product post-launch (engagement & operational metrics & KPIs) - leading to sound recommendations for continued investment, or pivot.

An ideal candidate will:

Start with why, not what. Have a curious nature and strong critical thinking / problem-solving abilities. Possess technical and business acumen. Be comfortable developing, articulating, and defending a point of view to different audiences at all levels within the organization. Have a strong point of view, weakly held. Be an effective communicator who tailors messages based on audience, environment, and context. Be adept at storytelling and distilling complex concepts into simple messages. Have strong functional and domain expertise - within omnichannel retail. Be agile and adaptable. Value perspective and seek the "right" answer vs. "being right". Demonstrate the ability to influence, rather than rely on direct authority. Able to flex between strategic thinking and tactical execution, balancing multiple priorities simultaneously. Be self-driven. Be passionate about building great customer experiences.

Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree required, MBA a plus
• 3-5 years of product management experience, project management experience, or item and data management experience; within Retail industry & Agile methodology a plus
• Understand retail math and analytics that drive retail performance
• Practice open and continuous communication, values keeping others informed, effectively presenting information in a clear, concise manner
• Excellent leadership, facilitation, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work across functional lines and at many levels
• Ability to think creatively, strategically and technically
• Ability to work a flexible schedule based on department and company needs

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