DIRECTOR OF CATEGORY DEVELOPMENT / SR MANAGER

About the role

The Director/ Sr Manager of Category Development leads the process, operating model, and discipline behind identifying, evaluating, and developing market opportunities that drive growth and margin expansion. This role partners with cross-functional leaders to orchestrate commercial alignment and ensure the organization operates with a shared market vision.

Responsibilities

• Long-term / Strategic Leadership: Owns processes, frameworks, and strategic discipline. Partners with functional decision-makers to outline business ambitions, shape insight-led initiatives, proactively orchestrate their deployment, and guarantee organization readiness to win in priority market segments.

• Business / Category / Channel Strategy Leadership: Leads the business strategy process that defines ambition, market model, where to play, and how to win. Ensures shared understanding of category roles, competitive position, and growth horizons. Works with cross-functionals to define the plan and roadmaps.

• Brand & Marketing Strategy: Partners with Brand and Marketing teams to develop consumer, customer, and brand objectives. Owns the process and strategic discipline for defining the branded portfolio, consumer target, positioning, and 4Ps strategy. Ensures all brand choices ladder up to category strategy and market opportunity.

• Innovation Platforms & Insight Development: Leads development of long-term innovation platforms grounded in consumer, operator, and customer insights. Connects category and channel opportunities to R&D and Product Development pipelines. Provides structured, insight-driven opportunity definitions for stage-gate with clear prioritization.

• Commercial Capability Roadmap: Owns the commercial capability model: tools, systems, processes, dashboards, and decision frameworks. Builds organizational category fluency and commercial discipline across the matrix. Standardizes how insights, strategy, and action flow across the enterprise.

• Go-to-Market Strategy Process: Creates GTM strategy frameworks across Retail, Foodservice, QSR, and emerging verticals. Partners with Channel Owners and Sales to ensure differentiated, insight-led approaches. Builds cross-functional GTM plans aligned with company goals. Drives cross-functional alignment on the logic behind channel choices and customer positioning.

• Short-term - Business Development: Integrates Brand, Product, Sales roadmaps, aligns priorities and activities to drive specific GTM priority initiatives. Brings clear, actionable consumer/operator insights to inform brand, category, and customer decisions. Clarifies short-term commercial implications of market shifts and addresses plans and action steps to refine and develop market position. Uses category logic to guide product and portfolio decisions. Partners with Supply Chain, R&D, and Category leads to make item-level decisions and execute them. Ensures decisions align with market logic, seeking significant economic impact. Develops customer-facing category narratives, opportunity frameworks, and JBS inputs. Enhances customer credibility by integrating insights and cross-functional expertise. Equips Sales with consistent, enterprise-backed category stories.

• Mobilizing Cross-functional Alignment: Diagnoses market, category, and customer performance gaps, with clear routines and processes to drive action and disciplined execution. Convenes RGM, Sales, Category, Marketing, and Ops to align on actions. Brings clarity to short-term levers: mix, price, pack, assortment, promo, GTM adjustments. Ensures performance actions reflect into shared goals and objectives.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree required; MBA preferred.
• 7+ years in category development, insights, RGM, brand/marketing, or commercial strategy.
• Strong track record of cross-functional leadership in a matrix environment.
• Exceptional strategic thinking, communication, and storytelling capability.
• Proficiency with syndicated data and insight platforms.
• Strong business acumen; experience in multi-channel food industries preferred.
• Can perform the functions of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation.

Pay

Base salary range of $101,000-$155,000.

Schedule

Not specified.