Sr Director, Product Management - MP&A

Product Strategy and Domain Leadership

Own the multi-year product vision and strategy for the MP&A domain, aligned to Five Below’s business priorities, enterprise strategy, and long-range planning needs.

Define the target product landscape and business capability model across core MP&A processes such as merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, demand forecasting, inventory acquisition and replenishment, seasonal allocation, in-season performance management, and related planning workflows.

Ensure product strategy reflects Five Below’s current reality: disconnected tools, manual handoffs, limited automation, inconsistent data definitions, and workflow friction that constrain scale and decision quality today.

Establish clear domain north stars and guardrails that connect product investments to business outcomes, user productivity, and operational resilience.

Deep Business Process Ownership

Develop deep understanding of the end-to-end MP&A process, including preseason planning, in-season adjustments, assortment development, item setup, PO requests and PO management, allocation review, DC split decisions, and sell-through monitoring, MFP, Assortment planning.

Lead process discovery and working sessions with business partners to document current-state journeys, pain points, handoffs, controls, and opportunities for standardization, simplification, and automation.

Translate business process needs into product requirements that are grounded in how planners, buyers, allocators, and merch operations teams actually work, not just in how current tools happen to function today.

Maintain a strong point of view on where Five Below should adopt standard package capabilities, where configuration is sufficient, and where differentiated workflows or microapps are required to support Five Below’s operating model.

Roadmap, Prioritization, and Portfolio Management

Own the MP&A domain roadmap and backlog, framing problems clearly, sequencing work intentionally, and balancing business value, urgency, risk, complexity, adoption readiness, and cost.

Prioritize between short-term continuity and long-term transformation, including targeted improvements to existing platforms while defining the future-state process and product architecture.

Lead product evaluation, build-vs-buy thinking, and vendor/RFP decision support for major MP&A platform decisions, especially in areas such as MFP, assortment planning, and supporting product capabilities.

Drive quarterly and multi-year roadmap planning with explicit linkage to business objectives, capability maturity, delivery feasibility, and organizational capacity for change.

KPI Ownership and Value Realization

Define and manage the key product and business KPIs for the MP&A domain, including measures such as forecast accuracy, planning cycle time, inventory productivity, and the ability to scale profitable assortments across seasons.

Establish additional domain measures that reflect the realities of Five Below’s operating model, such as planner productivity, adoption of in-system workflows, reduction in offline spreadsheets, data freshness, PO lifecycle visibility, vendor compliance, and speed of in-season decision-making.

Use both quantitative and qualitative data to frame problems, assess product-market fit inside the enterprise, validate roadmap choices, and prove value realization after release.

Ensure teams understand how product changes are expected to move business outcomes such as sales, margin, inventory health, and operational efficiency.

Product Delivery and Cross-Functional Execution

Lead senior product managers and cross-functional product squads through discovery, requirements, design, build, launch, adoption, and post-release learning.

Partner closely with Engineering, Architecture, Data, and Operations to ensure solutions are scalable, resilient, supportable, and well integrated with upstream and downstream systems.

Drive strong product management fundamentals across the team, including hypothesis-driven discovery, clear outcome definition, backlog hygiene, requirements quality, prioritization discipline, roadmap storytelling, and release readiness.

Partner with Engineering and Operations on operational KPIs and service expectations for key planning platforms, including data freshness, job success, planning cycle SLAs, and issue resolution.

Stakeholder Leadership and Change Management

Serve as the senior product partner for MP&A business leadership, building trusted relationships and ensuring the roadmap reflects both strategic priorities and practical process realities.

Lead cross-functional governance for major product decisions, trade-offs, and sequencing decisions across business, product, engineering, architecture, and data stakeholders.

Communicate product strategy, roadmap, risks, progress, and outcomes clearly to executive stakeholders and working teams.

Help the organization navigate change thoughtfully by balancing ambition with adoption readiness, training needs, process redesign, and the business’s capacity to absorb complexity.

Team Leadership and Product Craft

Build, lead, and coach a high-performing product team for MP&A, including senior product managers and other product practitioners supporting the domain.

Mentor team members on domain expertise, product craft, stakeholder management, KPI thinking, and enterprise product leadership.

Create a product culture grounded in accountability, clarity, curiosity, strong business partnership, and continuous improvement.