Lead - Footwear Testing - Innovation

Lead
- Footwear Dynamic Testing
- Innovation

Product Testing is the voice of the athlete and the consumer ’re responsible for ensuring every On product meets the highest quality standards and delivers a premium, high-performance experience by combining scientific rigor with real-world insight. As Lead in Footwear Testing, you will own the end-to-end validation of cutting‑edge concepts from our Innovation pipelines. You will lead high‑visibility brand bets, mentor junior team members, and establish the strategic framework and scalable testing structures that blend objective performance insights with consumer psychology—up until the concepts are ready to be handed over to inline development.

• Lead highly visible testing projects and major brand bets within the Innovation space. You will navigate complex stakeholder landscapes and drive cross‑functional alignment for key early‑stage initiatives that impact the broader company direction.
• Own the end‑to‑end testing process for complex concepts. Design, build, and establish efficient testing processes, timelines, and strategic pipelines, defining validation milestones to ensure a seamless, data‑rich handover to the inline testing specialists.
• Integrate consumer insights and psychological principles to optimize how we interact with our tester pool. Design subjective assessment methods that accurately capture the consumer mindset, perception, and emotional response to early‑stage products.
• Process large volumes of complex data utilizing advanced processing tools, translating testing results into dynamic visualizations and clear reports that enable confident decision‑making for project stakeholders.
• Conduct performance analyses independently or in close collaboration with Sports Science to find correlations between our testing data and their objective insights, ensuring foundational excellence in fit, comfort, durability, and performance.
• Handle the technical nuances and complex testing requirements of novel manufacturing methods and advanced prototyping, applying deep industry experience to solve unique validation challenges before inline integration.
• Deliver benchmarking and competitor insights on early‑stage concepts to identify opportunities for innovation and product differentiation.
• Drive team goals and process improvements. Act as a role‑model and mentor to junior testing specialists, contributing to the continuous evolution of testing methodologies within the fast‑paced innovation space.

• 7+ years of experience in footwear testing, product creation, sports science, or development, with a strong focus on footwear innovation and early‑stage validation.
• A background or strong foundational knowledge in psychology, human factors, or consumer science, enabling you to extract nuanced, subjective feedback from testers.
• Solid capability in handling and visualizing large datasets using advanced data analysis tools to efficiently clean, process, and present complex testing results.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of driving alignment across cross‑functional teams and confidently presenting strategic data on major brand bets to partners across the organization.
• A strong track record of setting up structured methodologies from the ground up, clearly defining project scopes, and a passion for mentoring junior talent.
• Detail‑oriented, creative, and solutions‑focused, with a proactive mindset and a strong passion for performance footwear.
• Comfortable working with flexibility and adaption to shifting priorities in a highly innovative environment.
• Open to occasional global travel to connect, facilitate, and test directly with our target consumers in key markets.
• Fluent in English (written and spoken).

We’re a team responsible for making sure that the products for On represent the highest quality & performance standards. We have a lot of responsibility to meet the needs and demands of our customers. So we analyse, test and validate our products in the most comprehensive manner. Only products that pass our rigorous tests ever go to market.

Just by the banks of the Limmat you’ll find our largest global hub in Zürich West – On Labs – where…