About the role:
Head of Category Management is the category leader for categories business. He/She is the person responsible and accountable for revenue, cost structure and profit/margin/free-cash flow. This is a large and complex role that drives execution. The role directly influences senior leaders. Decisions are both strategic and tactical in nature and affect the overall direction of a work group and are pertinent to the operations of the product line.
Scope of responsibility includes vendor Management, inventory management, marketing, pricing, and other day-to-day operational management for the Categories. This is a leadership positions where the incumbent is expected to plan and execute relentlessly, allocate resources to achieve goals, anticipate bottlenecks and encourage risk taking behavior to maximize business benefit.
Description of responsibilities:
Head of Category Management is the category leader for categories business. He/She is the person responsible and accountable for revenue, cost structure and profit/margin/free-cash flow. This is a large and complex role that drives execution. The role directly influences senior leaders. Decisions are both strategic and tactical in nature and affect the overall direction of a work group and are pertinent to the operations of the product line.
Scope of responsibility includes vendor Management, inventory management, marketing, pricing, and other day-to-day operational management for the Categories. This is a leadership positions where the incumbent is expected to plan and execute relentlessly, allocate resources to achieve goals, anticipate bottlenecks and encourage risk taking behavior to maximize business benefit.
Description of responsibilities:
- Business strategy & customer experience
- Business plan execution
- Financial accountability
- Customer acquisition & retention
- Operations
- Organizational and people leadership
- Responsible for end-to-end business strategy and customer experience & offering, including selection
- Owns and identifies business growth plan
- Owns user experience, website, features across category
- Leverages product teams to deliver against category objectives
- Sets and measures goals and targets across categories and functions
- Drives improvements to business processes and ensures quality
- Accountable for financial performance of the categories
- Responsible for customer acquisition and retention
- Innovates on behalf of customers - develops and drives category growth strategy
- Owns day-to-day category operations such as key vendor negotiation, inventory management, pricing etc.
- Drives and measures quality in internal and external processes
- Has direct reporting responsibility for multiple teams. Provides credible leadership to functional teams
- Influences across the company on behalf of the business
Required Qualifications:
- 10+ years work experience
- Bachelors minimum; MBA or analytical education will be advantageous
- Proven manager with a successful, resourceful and hands-on track record of running a complex business end-to-end combined with category management experience
- Deep analytical capabilities, potentially (although not necessarily) gained from a background in e-commerce, Consulting, Finance or business transformation
- Technology affinity and track record of employing systems to drive simplification and change for scale
- Demonstrable ability to build lasting relationships and conduct negotiations with leading global and local brands to obtain preferable terms and win:win solutions
- Able to balance strategy with strong operational skills - able to understand, deconstruct, streamline and optimize business processes
- Commercially astute, with strong focus and accountability
- Excellent business judgment, with a track record of generating ideas and solving problems independently
- Highly analytical and structured thinking
- Excellent track record in hiring and developing high performance teams
- Preferred Qualifications: Leadership experience in e-commerce and/or categories business; electronic background