Principal Product Manager

At Whole Foods Market, we’re passionate about providing exceptional products and experiences to our customers and team members alike. Principal Product Manager will be part of the Merchandising Product Management team, driving workstreams that deliver business-facing capabilities in the merchandising space. They will partner closely with Business and Category teams to reinvent business workflows that impact every product in our stores, and engage Tech and Data Science teams to drive solution design and implementation. A successful candidate will demonstrate the ability to navigate ambiguity, earn trust with stakeholders, lead with data, and make a measurable impact. The candidate should showcase the ability to think strategically (i.e., feature prioritization, trade-offs, defining goals and success metrics, building long-term product vision) as well as tactically (i.e., getting into the weeds, understanding complex systems and underlying processes, driving incremental improvements to existing processes when it’s the right thing to do). This role is based in Austin, TX, with an expectation of being in the Store Support office five days a week

Responsibilities:

• Leads the build-out of new applications.
• Articulates and mentors junior team members on application of Product Management concepts, practices, and methodologies.
• Owns the translation of business intent, customer needs, and/or technical direction into clear, concise, well-documented business requirements or product backlog for one or more complex applications (or a product family) spanning one or more technical domains.
• Bridges conversations between business users and development teams using knowledge of complex business processes and technical integration spanning one or more business domains.
• Develops longer-term (12 months or more) product roadmap, ensuring product development plans align with and support stakeholder business and application objectives.
• Identifies, describes, and continually evaluates end user personas, target users and/or user journeys and aligns solution delivery to their business and quality needs.
• Partners with business to develop business case for new or existing solutions with supporting documentation, gain stakeholder support and approval, and acquire necessary resources.
• Monitors industry trends, stakeholder satisfaction, usage trends, and related metrics to identify product / process improvement opportunities.
• Influences strategic thinking across the organization, ensuring cross-functional and cross-product collaboration and integration.
• Designs, segments, and recruits for user testing, A/B testing, interviews, and user surveys and synthesizes outputs to create actionable insights and drive product improvements.
• Influences product positioning and marketing communications from a business and user perspective.
• Provides inputs to financial models (i.e. TCO, ROI) for new candidate initiatives; assists budget owners in translating to quarterly forecasts.
• Supports management of budget and reports on actual capex and expense.
• Provides inputs to business cases supporting initiatives and the technology supporting them.

Skills:

• Advanced knowledge of and experience with custom and packaged/SaaS software design tools and development methodologies and ability to mentor junior team members.
• Working knowledge of complex technical and integration architecture patterns.
• Advanced knowledge of application deployment and support processes and tools.
• Advanced knowledge of standard software testing and bug reporting tools and techniques.
• Advanced knowledge of requirements or backlog management software.
• Advanced knowledge of product analytics tools, tagging approaches, and accurately interpreting metrics.
• Experience developing, publishing, and achieving product roadmaps.
• Knowledge of designing, segmenting, and recruiting for user testing, A/B testing, interviews, and user surveys and supporting tools.
• Experience synthesizing user testing outputs to create actionable insights.
• Awareness of approaches to scale products into the millions of concurrent users and/or transactions.
• Conveys and / or consults on issues of moderate to significant complexity.
• Regularly interacts with colleagues or customers up to the senior leadership level.
• Able to effectively present technical information and tell impactful user stories and respond to questions in both one-on-one situations and group meetings.
• Possesses clear understanding of WFM’s and supported region / stores business objectives, competitive strengths and opportunities.
• Understands and articulates complex business processes, user journeys, and technical integration spanning multiple business domains.
• Formulates, values and articulates business and financial requirements.
• Able to define and analyze the measures needed for business success.
• Able to play a key and influential role working with others, in groups, in cross-functional settings and with diverse stakeholders internally and externally.
• Advanced knowledge of software engineering practices; advanced experience with developing software products and technologies.
• Advanced ability to fully specify product requirements and use cases.
• Able to integrate customer, partner and technical /utilization feedback and performance metrics into product design, development and application.
• Advanced knowledge of software engineering practices; advanced experience with developing software products and technologies.

Education & Experience:

• BA/BS degree and 6-8 years’ relevant experience OR equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• Grocery or retail experience preferred

At Whole Foods Market, we provide a fair and equal employment opportunity for all Team Members and candidates regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic. Whole Foods Market hires and promotes individuals solely based on qualifications for the position to be filled and business needs.Whole Foods Market works with job sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter to promote opportunities at our company. Please be aware that other career sites may not be accurate or up to date and may even be fraudulent. We encourage and recommend all candidates to apply via our site.