Senior Product Line Manager, 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.

As the Senior Footwear Product Line Manager, you are responsible for the end‑to‑end seasonal direction and execution of owned Brooks footwear products across portals, platforms and pillars. You will provide vision and thought leadership for the product teams as the consumer, market and business expert during the footwear creation process. From brief to commercialization, you will provide product, consumer, business and market expertise with a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape, trends and innovation.

You will report to and work closely with your Manager, Product Line Management to execute against the 5‑year footwear strategy to hit business goals and financial targets with Horizons 1 (1‑3 years) and 2 (3‑5 years) in mind.

You may manage up to one PLM, guiding them to become a global expert on runners, to identify target personas, and to anticipate their wants and needs 1.5+ years in advance. You will lead this individual to be one of the best story crafters in the industry, that works cross‑functionally weaving the stories from innovation to market.

Strategic Planning and Execution

• 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 additional input of the rest of the PLM team and individual category experts.
• Partner with Manager, Footwear PLM to translate multiyear strategies, innovation pipelines, and product evolution into executable seasonal plans and inline briefs.
• Ensure seasonal product assortments are competitive, consumer‑relevant, and aligned to business objectives.

Innovation

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

Consumer, Insights, Briefing and Product Execution

Consumer and Insights

• 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. 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, triadscorecard 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 be able to ensure the team is executing at the highest level for the consumer and product readiness.
• Maintain a level of understanding in…