Senior Program Manager - Everything Else Category Expansion

Company Description

SSENSE, pronounced [es-uhns], is a Montreal-based fashion platform with global reach. Founded in 2003, SSENSE is pacing the vanguard of directional retail with a mix of luxury, streetwear, and avant-garde labels. We produce industry-leading original content and take pride in building our own technology solutions and systems from scratch. Our field of focus has grown beyond that of a typical e-commerce entity as we explore the nexus of content, commerce, and culture.

Currently serving 150 countries, generating an average of 88 million monthly page views, and achieving high double digit annual growth since inception, SSENSE is becoming a cultural protagonist in its own right.

Job Description

Reporting to the Senior Director of Product Management, the Senior Product Program Manager holds a critical role within the SSENSE Product team. Working on either a B2C or B2B2C organization-wide priority initiative, the Senior Product Program Manager works collaboratively with large scale cross-functional teams including Leadership, Business Stakeholders and Product Managers to determine the Product Vision for the program, and to define, build and synchronize delivery of the product roadmap to support the program goals.

Qualifications

RESPONSIBILITIES

Program Governance - 30% time

• Partner with Business and Tech leadership on the Tech program vision and KPIs

• Work with leadership to establish the annual Tech budget for priority program initiatives

• Define and maintain the program governance and communication across the Tech organization to drive focus on key initiatives, share critical information, celebrate wins and raise blockers

Program Strategy - 40% time

• Act as the single point of contact to build and drive alignment on the program product roadmap through effective partnership with Leadership, Business Stakeholders and Product Managers, and actively prioritize the program backlog

• Define the problem & opportunity space, own discovery and build business cases in partnership with key Business Stakeholders and Tech domains for large scale cross-functional integration projects, i.e. PIM, SAP, Seller Portal

• Play an active role to define the online experience, translating the program selling points to the customer across digital channels

• Serve as evangelist, thought leader, and subject matter expert both internally and externally on their program

• Conduct customer research and competitive benchmarks to identify major opportunities

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

• Raise the bar by initiating improvement on the program craft (tools, processes, structure…)

Program Delivery - 30% time

• Build simplified mechanisms for tracking, reporting and insights to ensure focus initiatives, from large scale to small, are clearly defined, communicated, moving forward successfully and results are shared back with the business

• Create, test and iterate working models across Tech domains and partner teams to enable the program roadmap

• Partner with Product Managers on discovery and collaborate with cross-functional domains, product team members, technology department, ux/product designers, and business to help move things forward

• Engage stakeholders at critical points during the initiative discovery to drive the highest impact

• Define success metrics for each initiative and and infuse this sense of accountability to the Product team by being rigorously outcome focused and customer satisfaction driven

• Engage in tough conversations and raise flags when needed to be able to progress, ensure clear and transparent communication adapted to different groups

• Develop change management practices to support large, and complex initiatives, and implement these plans to ensure project success and benefits realization

Additional Information

REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

• Master’s degree, MBA, MSc., PhD an asset

• Experience in Consulting, Finance, Investment banking or App and e-commerce retail experience preferred

• A minimum of 5 years relevant work experience, w/ developing software products and technologies

• 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

• Experience working within an Agile environment, an asset

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in French and English

SKILLS

• Ability to govern diverse programs and lead large scale, cross-functional, global initiatives and integrations

• Experience managing dynamic teams with the ability to provide clear direction and understand resource capability

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

• Demonstrated ability to gather user requirements across diverse functional areas and convert them into a compelling product vision and roadmap

• Strong ability to think critically, problem solve, prioritize and identify and eliminate conflict and bottlenecks

• Comfortable in operating in ambiguous, changing landscape

• Entrepreneurial, solution oriented, hands on, get stuff done attitude

• Strong business acumen and technical understanding

• Strong communication written and verbal

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, performance-driven environment

• Strong stakeholder management skills and ability to lead by influence across functional teams, at multiple levels, to enable focus on program goals

• Ability to define a product strategy and drive a cross-functional team to deliver on their potential

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.