Sr. Lead, Segment Product Integration

Newell Brands is a leading consumer products company with a portfolio of iconic brands like Graco®, Coleman®, Oster®, Rubbermaid®, Sharpie® and Yankee Candle® — and 24,000 talented teammates around the world. Our culture is built on values in action: Integrity, Teamwork, Passion for Winning, Ownership, and Leadership.

About the role

The Sr. Lead, Segment Product Integration – Kitchen (H&C) is a central, category-focused role responsible for driving product integration and synergy across Newell’s manufacturing plants for the Kitchen / Home & Commercial category. This role ensures that product standards, specifications, and best practices are consistently applied, identifies and drives cross-plant synergies (commonality, platforms, shared components, and suppliers), and feeds product lifecycle intelligence back into the MDC / NPC organization.

This is an influence-and-integration role: the SPI does not hold change-control authority but instead aligns, recommends, and coordinates to keep the category coherent, consistent, and cost-effective across sites. The role acts as the connective tissue between plants, NPC product development, and the ERA / NPI manufacturing teams, capturing synergy opportunities and ensuring standards and learnings flow across the network.

Responsibilities

• Drive product synergy across plants within the Kitchen (H&C) category — commonality, platforms, shared components, materials, and suppliers.
• Identify, quantify, and champion synergy and cost-reduction opportunities across sites.
• Harmonize product designs, specifications, and standards across plants to reduce duplication and complexity.
• Share and scale best practices, lessons learned, and proven product solutions across the network.
• Ensure product standards, specifications, and requirements are consistently understood and applied across plants — without owning change control.
• Provide category product expertise and guidance to plant teams.
• Flag deviations, gaps, and risks to the relevant owners (NPC / NPI / plant) and support resolution.
• Capture product lifecycle intelligence (field performance, quality, cost, and manufacturing learnings) and feed it back into NPC product development.
• Maintain a category-level view of the product portfolio across the network.
• Inform future product creation and platform decisions with cross-plant insights.
• Act as the category integrator across plants, NPC, NPI, and ERA / DFM — coordinating and aligning rather than directing.
• Build consensus and influence decisions without formal change-control authority.
• Facilitate cross-plant forums, reviews, and knowledge-sharing for the category.
• Support cost analyses and VAVE by surfacing cross-plant commonality and synergy opportunities.
• Partner with Cost Engineering, sourcing, and the laboratory on should-cost, benchmarking, and cost-reduction ideas that scale across sites.

Key Deliverables

• Cross-plant synergy and commonality opportunity pipeline (Kitchen / H&C).
• Harmonized product standards and specifications across plants.
• Product lifecycle intelligence feedback to NPC.
• Best-practice and lessons-learned playbooks for the category.
• Category synergy / cost-reduction results (influenced across the network).

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering (Mechanical, Electrical, Product, Industrial, or related).
• Experience in product development, industrialization, or product engineering for consumer products, ideally kitchen / home appliances.
• Strong understanding of product design, manufacturing processes, and the product lifecycle.
• Proven ability to influence and drive alignment across teams without direct authority.
• Advanced English (written and spoken).
• Willingness and ability to travel extensively across plants.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working across multiple plants, sites, or regions.
• Kitchen / small-appliance category experience (blenders, mixers, air fryers, coffee makers, and similar).
• Knowledge of DFM, VAVE, cost engineering, and platform / commonality strategies.
• Lean Six Sigma and/or project management background.
• Spanish and/or Portuguese language skills.

Skills & Abilities

• Strong influence, collaboration, and stakeholder management across sites and cultures.
• Ability to see the big picture across a category and connect the dots between plants.
• Strong product and manufacturing acumen for the category.
• Comfortable operating without formal authority — leading through expertise and relationships.
• Self-directed and mobile, comfortable working across multiple locations.
• Analytical and cost-aware, with strong problem-solving skills.

Schedule

Extensive travel across plants is a core requirement of this role.