Senior Product Line Manager, Footwear

Your Job

The Senior Footwear Product Line Manager oversees end-to‑end seasonal direction and execution of owned Brooks footwear products across portals, platforms and pillars. The role provides vision and thought leadership for the product teams as the consumer, market and business expert during the footwear creation process, from brief to commercialization. Responsibilities include guiding a PLM to become a global expert on runners, identifying target personas, and leading story crafting across the value chain.

• Be the expert on the evolution of the Brooks product line for your season of focus.
• Work closely with footwear PLM Leadership to chart the 5‑year roadmap of your season with input from the PLM team and category experts.
• Partner with Manager, Footwear PLM to translate multiyear strategies and innovation pipelines into executable seasonal plans and inline briefs.
• Ensure seasonal product assortments are competitive, consumer‑relevant, and aligned to business objectives.

• Identify future innovation and advanced concepts that are instrumental to consumer and cross‑category growth.
• Create one‑page innovation requests grounded in consumer latent needs, insights, and springboards, with the ask of a ground‑breaking innovation in H2 or H1.

• Serve as the seasonal consumer and marketplace expert, staying ahead of trends, competitive moves and evolving runner needs.
• Partner with Run‑Sights Lab or lead the undertaking of consumer immersion, research synthesis and insight springboards and translation for your season and the consumer briefs within each season.
• Curate time in market with key footwear team members, analyzing and interpreting data, interacting directly with consumers—including but not limited to leading consumer one‑on‑one interviews, shop‑alongs and rapid prototyping—and maintaining regular interactions with retailers to identify additional insights and opportunities and anticipate future trends.

• Begin with the ‘Why’ and the ‘Key consumer problem to solve.’
• Combine consumer insights (latent and/or expressed) and springboards, biomechanics POV, and new or future innovation capabilities to articulate a crafted story that comes to life in a product brief.
• Lead the cross‑functional and collaborative brief creation process that includes story crafting, key consumer benefits, KPIs, development toolbox and design concepts.

• Work cross functionally within the footwear team to drive product execution and be accountable for product readiness at key milestones—design review, triad scorecard and calibration presentations, sale meeting, etc.
• Provide expert experience and knowledge of technical execution across materials, upper construction, foams, midsole and outsole parts (2D, 3D and wood models) to ensure the team executes at the highest level.
• Maintain a level of understanding in Biomechanics to facilitate in‑depth dialogue with Engineering while translating technical verbiage into stories for the layman.
• Ensure market and consumer readiness of all products managed within your season of focus at 75% at Spam 1 and 95% at Spam 2.
• Travel at least 2+ times a year to Asia development centers to work with footwear colleagues to finalize changes for Spam product creation milestones.

• Work alongside Manager, PLM to ensure the PLM function deliverables are completed at key milestones.
• Partner closely with cross‑functional colleagues in design and development to create a productive, collaborative environment covering consumer, engineering, costing and design considerations throughout the product creation process.

• Be an exceptional story crafter by building stories that are informed by consumer insights.
• Work with product marketing, merchandising and sales to bring the product story to life and present it with confidence at brief handoff, SPAM/Calibration, Sales Meetings and vendor visits.
• Present line architecture, products, concepts and new technologies to internal and external stakeholders.
• Provide…