Digital Product Owner - Commercial Planning

JOB MISSION:

New Balance is seeking a highly motivated and strategic Digital Product Owner to lead our Commercial Planning technology products and capabilities. This individual will play a critical role in driving the evolution of our Demand Planning and Inventory Planning ecosystem, ensuring that technology investments deliver measurable business value while enabling reliable, scalable, and efficient planning processes.

The Product Owner will partner closely with global planning leaders, business stakeholders, engineering teams, architects, and external partners to define product strategy, prioritize investments, and deliver technology solutions that improve planner productivity, data integrity, operational stability, and decision-making. This role will own the product roadmap and backlog for Commercial Planning capabilities and drive outcomes from concept through implementation and value realization.

MAJOR ACCOUNTABILITIES:

Product Strategy & Ownership

• Own and communicate the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for Commercial Planning capabilities.
• Align product priorities to business objectives, planning outcomes, and enterprise technology strategy.
• Define success metrics, business outcomes, and KPIs for product investments and continuously evaluate value realization.

Product Delivery

• Translate business problems into epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, and prioritized backlog items.
• Lead the end-to-end product lifecycle from discovery and design through development, testing, release, adoption, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with engineering teams to evaluate solution alternatives, technical tradeoffs, scalability considerations, and implementation risks.
• Prioritize work across enhancements, defects, technical debt, data quality initiatives, and operational stability efforts.

Stakeholder Partnership

• Serve as the primary liaison between Commercial Planning business teams and technology teams.
• Facilitate requirements gathering, discovery sessions, design reviews, backlog refinement, sprint planning, and release readiness activities.
• Develop trusted partnerships with planning leadership, product management, engineering, enterprise architecture, data teams, and external vendors.
• Communicate roadmap progress, deployment plans, risks, dependencies, and business impacts to stakeholders at all levels.

Stability, Quality & Data Integrity

• Drive product improvements that increase platform reliability, user trust, and planning process effectiveness.
• Identify recurring incidents, manual workarounds, data quality concerns, and process inefficiencies, and convert them into prioritized product investments.
• Establish strong testing, validation, monitoring, and release management practices.
• Partner with teams across the technology ecosystem to improve data quality, integration reliability, and operational performance.

Agile Product Leadership

• Maintain a healthy and prioritized product backlog aligned to strategic objectives.
• Work closely with delivery teams to ensure clear requirements, acceptance criteria, and business context.
• Participate in sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, release planning, and roadmap governance forums.
• Ensure delivered solutions are measurable, usable, scalable, and aligned to business needs.

REQUIREMENTS FOR SUCCESS:

• 5 years of Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Systems, Supply Chain, Planning Systems, or related technology experience.
• Experience delivering enterprise technology products using Agile methodologies.
• Experience working with Planning, Supply Chain, Inventory Management, Demand Planning, Merchandising, Wholesale, Retail, or Consumer Products processes preferred.
• Experience with enterprise planning platforms such as o9, Blue Yonder, Kinaxis, SAP IBP, Anaplan, or similar solutions preferred.
• Experience with ERP systems, data integrations, master data, reporting platforms, and enterprise applications preferred.
• Strong product management mindset with the ability to define vision, strategy, roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.
• Ability to translate complex business challenges into actionable product requirements.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with a data-driven approach to decision making.
• Strong understanding of Agile principles, backlog management, and iterative product delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to balance competing priorities and make effective business and technology tradeoff decisions.
• Excellent facilitation, presentation, and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong written and verbal communication abilities.
• Ability to influence without direct authority across cross-functional teams.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and leading organizational change.
• Collaborative leader who builds trust and drives alignment across business and technology teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Supply Chain, Information Systems, Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
• MBA, Product Management certification, Agile certification, or equivalent experience is a plus.