Director, Product Operations

About the role

The Director of Product Operations & Excellence is the VP of Product’s trusted operating partner for excellence across the entire product organization. This role owns everything that makes the roadmap executable: keeping the multiple product management tracks operationally aligned, running the day-to-day partnership with both in-house and offshore engineering, and building and maintaining the working models, rituals, and systems that let the team deliver at a high level. This role also carries a major share of go-to-market execution and executive-facing communication. The Director represents Product Operations directly to brand and executive stakeholders, gives the organization an honest and current view of delivery health, and acts as the person the VP of Product can hand an ambiguous cross-team problem to and trust it gets solved.

Essential Functions

Product Operating System & Delivery Health

• Build and maintain the sprint cadence, planning rituals, tooling, and delivery processes used across both the Platform PM track (Rest, Specialty, Strategic Initiatives, Omnichannel) and the Brand Experience PM track (Menu, Content/CMS, and related work).
• Manage capacity planning, sprint coordination, defect triage, and release readiness for internally-built platform work, in close day-to-day partnership with engineering leadership.
• Manage the working relationship, communication cadence, and delivery accountability for offshore-built work, and close any gap between how in-house and offshore delivery gets tracked, reported, and held to the same quality bar.
• Keep the Platform PM, Brand Experience PM, and Store Technology PM roadmaps synchronized and free of conflicting dependencies, and maintain a single accurate view of what’s in flight, in close coordination with the Sr. Director of Product on strategy and prioritization.
• Build and run the process for triaging, prioritizing, and resolving production defects and post-launch issues so unplanned defect work doesn’t silently displace roadmap commitments.
• Partner with Customer & Data Insights to ensure customer feedback and market/competitive intelligence are collected, routed to the right PM track, and reviewed on a predictable cadence — closing the loop operationally so nothing falls through the cracks.

Go-to-Market & Executive Awareness

• Coordinate cross-functional launch readiness — engineering, brand, marketing, analytics — for major initiatives, ensuring every GTM plan has an accountable owner and not just a plan on paper.
• Represent delivery status, risk, and operational health directly to executive and brand leadership, in addition to keeping the VP of Product informed.
• Step into cross-team problems, unblock delivery issues, and represent the product organization’s operational rigor in rooms the VP can’t always be in personally.

People Management

• Directly manage two Product Operations Managers with complementary, cross-covering mandates: one working primarily with the PM teams and brand stakeholders and secondarily with engineering, and one working primarily with in-house and offshore engineering and secondarily with the PM and brand teams.
• Set priorities and resolve escalations across both sides of the operating model, ensuring the PM/brand-facing and engineering-facing halves of Product Operations stay coordinated rather than functioning as two disconnected functions.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in business, operations, engineering, or a related field — or equivalent professional experience.

Work Experience

• 6+ years of experience in product operations, technical program management, or delivery management, ideally partnering directly with both in-house and offshore or outsourced engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ownership of a product organization’s operating cadence: has built or run the sprint rituals, planning cycles, and delivery tracking that keep multiple concurrent workstreams coordinated.
• Offshore or outsourced development experience: has personally owned the communication cadence, delivery accountability, and quality bar for externally-built work, and closed the gap between how internal and external delivery gets reported.
• Track record of go-to-market execution: has coordinated cross-functional launch readiness — not just tracked it on a status sheet — for consumer-facing digital products or platforms.
• Executive-facing experience: has presented delivery status, risk, and operational health directly to senior or executive leadership and earned trust through clarity and candor rather than polish.
• People management experience, ideally managing team members with different specializations — such as one PM/brand-facing and one engineering-facing — who need to stay tightly coordinated with each other.

Skills

• Systems thinker: Builds and maintains the operating model itself — rituals, tooling, reporting — rather than simply working within a system someone else designed.
• Engineering fluency: Comfortable in the details of sprint planning, technical dependencies, and release coordination with both in-house and offshore engineering teams.
• Executive presence: Can walk into a room with senior leadership and brand stakeholders and give a clear, credible, non-defensive account of where things stand and what needs to change.
• Roadmap discipline: Keeps the Platform and Brand Experience roadmaps synchronized and visible, in close coordination with the Sr. Director of Product on prioritization calls.
• GTM orchestration: Can pull engineering, brand, marketing, and analytics into a single coordinated launch plan and hold each function accountable to it.
• Trusted operational judgment: The VP of Product can hand this person an ambiguous, cross-team problem and trust that it gets solved without hand-holding.
• People management across two disciplines: Manages a PM/brand-facing operations manager and an engineering-facing operations manager as one coordinated function, not two silos.

May be required to travel up to 25% of the time.