Senior Innovation Manager

Innovation Maturity Champion

Leads enterprise implementation and evolution of the stage-gate innovation process, including governance, standards, and cadence.

Partners with key stakeholders (brand, engineering, operations, finance, insights) to define and maintain best practices, templates, and decision criteria.

Coaches cross-functional teams in developing well-thought-out business cases and navigating the innovation process with appropriate rigor, documentation quality, and decision readiness.

Leads innovation-process adoption by delivering training, onboarding, and reinforcement to build consistent capability across functions and business units, partnering with Enterprise Change Management to align efforts with broader organizational change practices as needed.

Defines and tracks process health metrics (e.g., gate quality, cycle time, throughput, learning capture) and drives continuous improvement initiatives.

Supports brand teams in translating strategy into executable plans, ensuring alignment to business objectives, validated consumer needs, and market potential.

Post-Launch Analysis

Establishes and maintains a repeatable post-launch review process, including timing, inputs, facilitation approach, and outputs.

Collects cross-functional feedback on strengths, gaps, and lessons learned across discovery, development, launch readiness, and commercialization.

PARTNERS WITH FINANCE TO GATHER AND ANALYZE PERFORMANCE DATA (SALES, MARGIN, MIX, FORECAST ACCURACY, SUPPLY/SERVICE, ETC.) TO IDENTIFY TRENDS AND PATTERNS.

Facilitates root-cause analysis with business teams to distinguish execution issues from strategy/assumption gaps and to document evidence-based learnings.

Converts post-launch learnings into action by updating standards, training, and best practices and ensuring insights are shared and applied across future and in-flight initiatives.

Innovation Catalyst

Serves as a strategic thought partner to business leaders, advocating for consumer and business-impact opportunities and clarifying where resources will have the highest return.

Plans and facilitates ideation, concepting, and strategic planning sessions, ensuring clear problem framing, strong participation, and actionable outputs.

Collaborates with Consumer Insights and Brand Management to build opportunity landscapes (jobs-to-be-done, segments, white spaces, unmet needs) and synthesize them into prioritized innovation horizons.

Stays current on industry trends and emerging technologies, evaluating relevance and applicability to near, mid, and long-term innovation pipelines.

Strengthens value propositions, assumptions, validation plans, and success metrics early in development.

Performs other duties as assigned.