Product Line Manager II, Footwear

Your Job

The Mission of the Product Line Management and Blue Line teams is to be the voice of the consumer in the product creation process, set the product benefit expectations, and ensure that this vision is maintained from brief to market. The primary goal is to bring Brooks’ complete and competitive footwear product lines to market in a timely and profitable manner and to identify the products, technologies, experiences and processes that will shape the future of running in innovative ways.

The Footwear Product Line Manager II (PLM II) plays a critical role in delivering successful seasonal footwear assortments  this role, you are responsible for the execution of assigned seasonal footwear projects, ensuring consumer wants and needs, product intent, and business objectives come together from brief through commercialization.

As a PLM II, your primary focus is owning and executing within a season, translating consumer insights and springboards into strong consumer‑centric product briefs and guiding the product team through the product creation process.

Strategic Planning and Execution

• Be the expert on the evolution of the line plan for your season of focus.
• Partner with Manager, Footwear PLM to translate multi‑year strategies, innovation pipelines, and line plan evolution into executable inline briefs.
• Ensure seasonal product assortments are competitive, consumer‑relevant, and aligned to business objectives.

Consumer, Insights, Briefing and Product Execution

• Serve as the seasonal consumer and marketplace expert, staying ahead of trends, competitive moves, and evolving runner needs.
• Participate in insights latent and expressed needs research projects in conjunction with RSL and/or other PLMs that are then leveraged as springboards within the consumer briefs for each season. Mentor PLM‑I through this process to grow their knowledge to participate in future projects.
• Curate time in market with key footwear team members, analyzing and interpreting data, interacting directly with consumers including but not limited to leading consumer on‑one interviews, shop‑along and rapid prototyping.
• Maintain regular interactions with retailers to identify additional insights and opportunities and anticipate future trends.

Briefs

• 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 the story crafting, key consumer benefits, KPIs, development toolbox and design concepts.

Product Execution

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

Collaboration

• Partner closely with cross‑functional colleagues in design and development to create a productive, collaborative environment to cover all the consumer, engineering, costing and design considerations and areas of focus throughout the product creation process.

Story Crafting, Presentations and Cross Functional Support

• Be an exceptional story crafter by building stories that are informed by consumer insights.
• Present line architecture, products, concepts and new technologies to internal and external…