Senior Product Development Manager Hybrid Innovation

About Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc.

At SBH, our purpose is to inspire a more colorful, confident, and welcoming world. We are the leader in professional hair color, selling and distributing professional beauty supplies across 11 countries through our Sally Beauty and Beauty Systems Group businesses. Sally Beauty offers products for hair color, hair care, nails, and skin care to retail customers looking for salon-quality products at a value price.

Beauty Systems Group, branded as Cosmo Prof or Armstrong McCall stores, along with its direct sales consultants, sell professionally branded products intended for use and resale by salons to retail consumers.

Essential Function

The Senior Product Development Manager serves as the commercial and product development leader for assigned Own Brand categories. This role translates consumer insights, market trends, supplier capabilities, and business performance into profitable innovation, portfolio decisions, and business growth strategies. Partnering closely with Merchandising and cross-functional teams, this leader drives commercialization from concept through launch while identifying and solving business issues, influencing leader decisions, optimizing portfolio performance, mentoring team members, and driving continuous improvement.

This position bridges Product Development Manager and Director, demonstrating business leadership in addition to development excellence. This is a hybrid role reporting into the support center at Legacy West in Plano Texas.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end product development lifecycle from concept through commercialization for assigned categories.

• Own the health and performance of assigned product portfolios by evaluating innovation, lifecycle performance, assortment productivity, and post-launch results.

• Develop business cases supported by financial analysis, consumer insights, competitive intelligence, and market trends.

• Lead strategic initiatives that address business opportunities or challenges across assigned categories, including growth gaps, margin pressure, assortment productivity, innovation performance, and lifecycle optimization.
• Identify business issues using financial, customer, competitive, and category data, and develop actionable recommendations to improve growth, profitability, and portfolio health.

• Partner with Merchandising to recommend new product introductions, product upgrades, reformulations, packaging enhancements, and SKU optimization opportunities.

• Build and maintain a multi-season innovation pipeline aligned with category objectives.

• Develop the assigned business through portfolio strategy, innovation pipeline planning, SKU optimization, supplier capability development, and commercial performance management.

• Translate customer insights, supplier capabilities, emerging technologies, and business performance into actionable product recommendations.

• Lead cross-functional commercialization teams across Merchandising, Marketing, Creative, Regulatory, Sourcing and Planning.

• Drive alignment across partners while balancing customer experience, profitability, operational feasibility, timing, and compliance.

• Influence senior leaders and cross-functional partners to align on business priorities, investment choices, product strategies, and execution plans.

• Monitor launch success, sales performance, margin improvement, cost optimization, speed-to-market, and commercialization milestones.

• Proactive Management of Projects and Portfolio. Identify project, category or brand risks early and implement mitigation plans.

• Develop strategic supplier partnerships that improve innovation, quality, speed-to-market, and cost competitiveness.

• Support supplier negotiations through value engineering and cost optimization initiatives where relevant.

• Champion continuous improvement by simplifying processes and standardizing best practices.

• Leverage dashboards, analytics, and KPIs to support business decisions and executive recommendations.

• Present product strategies, business cases, innovation concepts, and portfolio recommendations to senior leadership.

• Mentor Product Development Managers, Assistant Managers, and cross-functional partners through coaching and knowledge sharing.

• Serve as the product development subject matter expert while fostering accountability, collaboration, and innovation.

Key Performance Indicators

Commercial:Portfolio sales growth, Gross margin improvement, Cost optimization, Innovation productivity, Category penetration

Execution:On-time…