Director, Marketing Strategy, Planning, and Operations

About the Role

The Farmer’s Dog is looking for a Director of Marketing Strategy, Planning & Operations to serve as the connective tissue across every pillar of Marketing. This role ensures the organization operates from one shared view of spend, priorities, and goals. Reporting to marketing leadership, you’ll partner with Finance and all marketing teams to build and manage the budget, bring rigor to planning, and align every channel with the same objectives. This highly quantitative role sits at the intersection of strategy, finance, and operations.

What We Stand For

• One Team: We align around shared goals, not departments. We bring together the right people and context to solve problems holistically, ensuring every interaction considers the customer journey.
• Skeptical About Everything, Precious About Nothing: Ideas can come from anywhere, and we’re quick to change course if a better solution emerges. We proactively seek input and prioritize impact over tradition.
• Execute for Impact: We reject “best practices” and “industry benchmarks” in favor of being the best we can be. Roles are flexible—e.g., acquisition teams focus on retention and customer experience.
• Focused and Hypothesis-Driven: We treat everything beyond our goals as hypotheses to validate. We work sequentially, constantly reprioritizing based on new information, and avoid rigid timelines.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end marketing budget process, including planning, allocation, in-year reprioritization, and reporting, ensuring all leaders and Finance partners work from a single, trusted view of spend.
• Analyze and recommend cross-channel investment optimizations using CAC, LTV, Retention, and ROI to inform the media mix.
• Partner with marketing leadership and Finance to build annual and quarterly budget scenarios, translating business goals into funding recommendations and clearly outlining tradeoffs.
• Assess and surface risks in the marketing plan (e.g., pacing, channel concentration, forecast variance) and propose mitigation strategies before issues arise.
• Establish the operating cadence (planning cycles, budget reviews, cross-pillar syncs, reporting rhythms) to align all marketing teams around shared goals.
• Serve as the analytical backbone for marketing leadership, turning performance and spend data into clear, defensible recommendations for investment decisions.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Finance, Data, and all marketing pillars (Acquisition, Lifecycle, Brand, Creative) to ensure consistent planning assumptions, KPIs, and definitions.
• Lead post-mortems and forecasting reviews on major marketing investments, capturing lessons learned and feeding them into future planning.
• Build and maintain tools, trackers, and reporting infrastructure to make marketing spend and performance visible to stakeholders at all levels.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in channel marketing analytics, strategic finance, FP&A, or marketing strategy and planning, ideally in a DTC or subscription business.
• Deeply numbers-driven, with experience building financial models, budget scenarios, and forecasts, and translating them into clear recommendations for non-financial stakeholders.
• Experience partnering with Finance and cross-functional leaders on budget planning, allocation, and tradeoff decisions.
• Ability to spot risks early (e.g., pacing, concentration, forecast variance) and present structured, credible recommendations to leadership.
• Experience building or running planning cadences and operating rhythms to align multi-channel or multi-team organizations around shared goals.
• Strong executive presence and ability to communicate complex tradeoffs simply and persuasively to senior stakeholders.
• Comfortable challenging assumptions and bringing structure to ambiguity.
• Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; proactive, curious, and solutions-oriented.
• Strong ownership mindset, problem-solving skills, and ability to prioritize tasks with attention to detail.
• Skilled at distilling complexity into simple terms to drive decision-making.
• Passion for dogs.

Schedule

This is an in-office role requiring 4–5 days per week in the SoHo office to foster collaboration and engagement.

Benefits

• Dog-friendly office in SoHo.
• Market-competitive compensation and equity packages.
• Comprehensive healthcare, dental, and vision coverage.
• Company-supported mental health benefits.
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Competitive 401k plan with company match.
• Flexible PTO.
• Discounted fresh food for your pup.

Pay

For this role, the anticipated hiring base compensation range is $191,000–$210,000 USD annually (NYC market data; range may vary for other locations). The compensation package includes base salary, bonus, and equity ownership in the company.