Product Manager - Inventory Planning

REI is on a journey to build a new technology foundation within our merchandising ecosystem to support future growth and address system and process gaps that will drive strategic initiatives. As a Product Manager you will lead the implementation of a new Demand Planning and Merchandise Financial Planning system. You will develop a deep understanding of strategic direction and core business problems of merchandising teams and develop these into a vision, strategy, and roadmap to deliver value to our customers, and support evolving company direction.

This job contributes to REI success by playing a leadership role and providing vision and oversight to driving the roadmap for Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) and Demand Planning. This Product Manager will leverage internal and external analysis to drive decisions around the development and vision of the customer-focused product strategy. The position will attain a deep understanding of the role of mature planning capabilities in delivering compelling assortments across Retail and Digital channels. They will further help in the prioritization and development of our portfolio of Merchandising products that enable our internal customers to delight our members (Customers) and deliver value back to REI. The Manager will work with stakeholders from across the organization to identify the right business opportunities to address with the right technology solutions. Experience working with off-the-shelf/SaaS software providers and influencing their roadmap and product deliverables is key. This role models and acts in accordance with REI’s guiding values and mission.

• Work with designers and architects/engineers to translate customer needs into a design and technical plan
• Responsible for a core piece of a business capability with a well-understood business user base. Expected to effectively deliver impactful features for these business users
• Effectively communicates and aligns with multiple product teams and stakeholders to drive towards common goals
• Lead your team through a process of discovering how to best solve for key opportunities. Encourage and incorporate the feedback of key stakeholders
• Contributes to the strategic and quarterly planning processes; articulating objectives and key results, and conducts hindsight analysis on results
• Develops and maintains a complete working knowledge and documentation of financial planning and demand planning current and future processes, gaps/pain points, and applications (including business functionality, interfaces, data flow, and functional architecture)
• Contributes to business process design workshops, advocating for business users, understanding and enabling industry leading best practices across multiple merchandising disciplines
• Effectively communicates and aligns with multiple product teams and stakeholders to drive towards common goals.
• Provides exceptional support to business users, triaging and solving process questions, system issues and bugs, while partnering with technical teams to communication to business users, and resolving issues
• Work with a cross functional product team to deliver solutions that create positive outcomes for our business users business
• Creates clear requirements or backlog stories/features/epics, business processes, and requests for proposals (RFPs) with all required data and details to have in depth feasibility and strategic conversations with technical partners
• Develop and build test cases, work with QA teams, and conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with end-users
• Contributes to backlog grooming/prioritization sessions to ensure sign-off by business and development teams
• Utilizes various data analytic tools to gain deep insights about business users and usage behaviors
• Actively utilizes and helps improve product practices for the Co-op
• Articulates the product vision and clearly translates the vision into clear requirements for the roadmap. Creates buy-in for the product vision with key business and technical partners
• Proactively assists product team to recognize dependencies, remove barriers and ensure smooth product delivery
• Advocates, supports, and contributes to ongoing improvement of Product practices at the co-op
• Develop end-user documentation and assist with training and rollout plans for new systems, or enhancements to existing systems as determined by direct Manager and/or Change Management lead
• Uses tools to conduct discovery with their product team, such as business user surveys, data analytics and journey mapping

Required skills and experience

• ERP Systems Understanding
• Proven ability to leverage data and insights to make informed product decisions
• Technical fluency; comfort understanding and discussing technology concepts, schedule trade-offs and new opportunities with technical team members
• 5+ years’ general Merchandising product experience, including 2+ years’ experience as a Product Manager or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Experience working collaboratively with engineers, data analysts, solution & domain architects
• Experience in building and operationalizing holistic solutions that meet the needs for multiple lines of businesses
• Proven track record of delivering impactful products / services to a broad customer base in an agile environment.
• Large scale SaaS/platform implementation or management
• Business Analysis
• Forecasting and Retail planning experience
• Experience designing and executing product discovery and product optimization for internal tools and users
• Strong analytical, business process, communication and business acumen skills
• Understanding of data value streams, and ability to identify data quality concerns
• Familiarity with fundamental concepts of Systems Thinking
• Demonstrated ability to self-educate and learn while doing
• Demonstrated experience with facilitating business user sessions

Preferred Qualifications

• Project management skills including ability to create individual action plans and timelines, and complete action items in a timely manner
• Framework/ways of working implementations (Ex, move from waterfall to Agile methodology. Business process management to product management)
• Statistics/data analysis

REI hires, trains, and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law. We remain deeply committed to making the Co-op a place where everyone can feel safe and be themselves. Join us.

#LI-BS1

As required by applicable Pay Transparency laws, REI provides a range of compensation for roles that may be hired in locations under these requirements. Factors that may be used to determine your actual salary may include a wide array of factors, including: your specific skills and experience, geographic location or other relevant factors.

The pay for this role is: $96400 - $154300 per year .