Location: Chicago, IL. Remote applicants may be considered. 

Opportunity

This is a unique opportunity to play a key role in the digital transformation of Kohler industry-leading Kitchen & Bath International business. You will lead the following practices: product management, digital product design, product data enrichment, content authoring, search tuning, and partner with engineering and business leaders to grow existent digital products for consumers, partners and global specifiers. As a leader of empowered teams, you will leverage your expertise to create products that are viable, usable and feasible creating/scaling products our customers love but that are aligned with business objectives. Set a strong product vision design thinking and product operation principles to lead cross-functional teams that aim to set the foundation for our international markets (outside of North America) and expand Direct-to-consumer revenue stream for Kohler internationally.

The ideal candidate is passionate about the digital customer experience and the power of digital products to augment and transform digital interactions with Kohler. Kohler is already the world’s leading International Kitchen & Bath brands with innovative and quality products – come help us extend that leadership into always-on digital experiences that elevate how we sell/specify digitally.

Responsibilities

• Your responsibilities will be aligned to digital product strategy, product development, user interface and user experience design, and post-launch iteration, improvement, and scaling.
• Own product strategy, roadmap & goals for new digital products and major enhancements and upgrades to existing products. This includes identifying and sizing new opportunities, making trade-off and prioritization decisions based on viability (business opportunity & customer value), and driving hypothesis-driven relevance, ranking & content understanding investments that align with broader organizational strategy and goals.
• Align Regions within the Kitchen & Bath International Business around shared customer understanding, user digital journeys, product vision & success criteria. Drive clarity on complex decisions and ensure healthy cross-functional collaboration through effective communication and execution skills.
• Use data, research and market understanding to deliver impactful product solutions that are grounded in a deep understanding of customer circumstances and needs.
• Lead brainstorming sessions, and design reviews to drive the best solutions and outcomes. Coaches team to establish strong objectives and key results that are tied to business/customer outcomes that are measurable.
• Actively encourages and fosters the discovery and implementation solution named at improving customer experience (internal / external) and enhancing and optimizing deliverables.
• Establish best in class competencies around product management, design, product data enrichment and content management aligned to the broader digital structures within the organization, and build a digital culture that aligns with Kohler Bold leadership goals.
• Needs to be able to manages ambiguity, cultivates innovation across the team, drives engagement and collaboration, drives results tied to outcomes, provides coaching to teams and drives context setting through a strategic mindset. Exemplifies positive and resilient mindset and excels in being able to adjust communication to different audiences (across regions, brands, and to external partners/business units). Drives an organization that continuously learns and portrays a growth mindset when faced with challenges and new opportunities.

Skills

• Proven track record for new product innovation, including design thinking frameworks, product ideation, and agile development.
• Proven record in leading empowered teams, and familiar with as product operating model.
• Ability to test concepts through fact-finding and data-informed decision-making, which can be brought to market quickly by evaluating each concept demand.
• Drives a customer first approach derived from user-based research as a foundation to build creative solutions to solve user needs.
• Ability to lead/influence cross-functional teams across all levels of the organization and work collaboratively in a matrixed environment. Find common goals of the cross-functional teams and encourage harmony in a uniform direction.
• Demonstrated ability to independently manage multiple complex products simultaneously.
• Acts with expertise as the organization's authority on using clear and effective verbal communications skills to express ideas, request actions and formulate plans or policies.
• Experience and strong comfort level speaking directly with senior-level executives.