Director, Influencer and Partnerships

Who We Are

The Farmer’s Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We’re starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers’ doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future.

To date, The Farmer’s Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You’ll Come In

We have big, ambitious goals. Our mission is to give dog lovers true peace of mind by helping them do the best for their dogs – this will require us to completely reimagine how we care for our dogs and drive meaningful shifts in an industry that is desperate for change. We don’t believe this is possible by implementing “best practices” or operating how the rest of the industry operates.

That’s why we’re looking for a highly innovative, strategic, and principles-driven Director of Influencer and Partnerships to lead efforts for The Farmer’s Dog, taking our programs to unimagined levels of efficiency, sustainability, and scale.

The Director of Influencer and Partnerships plays a vital role in our mission by owning programs aimed at finding, developing, and partnering with advocates of The Farmer’s Dog across a variety of strategies and sources.  This includes but is not limited to affiliates, influencers, and large strategic partnerships with organizations, celebrities, brands and entities. This person is excellent at prioritization, negotiation, and establishing lenses of measurement so that they and their team can triangulate and build hypotheses on impact and efficacy of efforts holistically. The Director of Influencer & Partnerships has a diverse background in Growth Marketing and has successfully integrated partnerships of various structures and sizes into the core channel mix. 

You should be intuitively holistic in your approach, an excellent communicator, and hyper-focused on driving maximum business impact today and over time. You’ll have the opportunity to take the foundation we have in place (including an existing team of high-performing operators) and evolve it to establish The Farmer’s Dog as the leading trusted pet care brand and the best option for dogs.

One Team: We don’t think of ourselves as “Acquisition Marketers”, “Engineers”, “Data Analysts”, or “Product Managers”. Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don’t think departments matter. We’d rather align ourselves to the goals we’re working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing:  Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren’t tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there’s a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions:  We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is.  We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention.  We answer questions and address problems early and proactively.  We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don’t subscribe to “best practices” or “industry KPIs”. We’re uninterested in how we compare to “benchmarks”; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don’t subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption: We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, “what’s the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?”. We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don’t expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

One of the amazing things about not subscribing to the traditional and classic definitions of roles is that we expect you to have an active hand in shaping this role and what you’ll focus on. The below is meant to be an illustrative list of the kinds of initiatives you might work on, but it’s not meant to be comprehensive nor prescriptive.

• Lead and develop a high-impact team responsible for scaling and improving our existing partnerships portfolio. You are excellent at leading through others, have high expectations, are direct and empathetic with feedback, and are eager to continuously surpass our goals and re-define ‘best-in-class’.
• Drive sustainable growth in Influencer, Affiliate, and Partnerships, ensuring we invest responsibly yet boldly, leveraging innovative strategies to meet an evolving customer base in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. Balance short term impact with long term growth. Model and communicate the value and impact of all initiatives for effective prioritization.
• Bring thought-leadership to the department overall, because you know that no interaction exists in a silo and everything works together and therefore you have perspective and opinions on just about every channel and initiative across the customer journey.
• Champion a thorough experimentation culture within your function that balances and includes incremental building and big bets. OKRs are designed with this mindset.
• Build a data-guided and high decision-quality culture. Both individually and collectively dive deep in our data (which includes talking to customers & leads often) to uncover insights that allow us to methodically remove friction from the experience across key customer segments and expedite movement through the pre-checkout portion of this journey.
• You are recognized as an excellent person to partner with externally - because you operate with the highest levels of integrity, are very direct and have high expectations for partners yet are always fair and collaborative.  People want to work with you.  This includes excellent negotiation skills.

We're Excited About You Because

There is no single background or set of experiences that we’re beholden to. Confident you could drive impact in the areas outlined above? Apply and let us know why. The below is the kind of backgrounds we’re most excited about currently.

• You have demonstrated your ability to build, negotiate, manage, and scale many Influencer, affiliate, and brand partnerships. You’ve done this in a bold, holistic, and customer-focused manner. You’ve used your hands-on experience to design and execute holistic, innovative, effective strategies.
• You are an exceptional people manager. You expect a lot, but you support your team along the way. You empower your reports and create cultures and ceremonies/feedback loops so that everyone can and should operate with autonomy. You encourage feedback and debate from your function and across all levels. You are passionate about developing talent.
• You lead through others - you don’t need to be the one to ‘do all the things’ to have an outsized impact, and your impact should be felt across the entire organization.
• You have demonstrated excellent intuition yet are also analytical, and can tell a story from a set of data.  There are clear examples of opportunity identification and pattern matching in your career. This could be experience in data analytics/insights, media, scaling businesses, and/or other entrepreneurial endeavors. You should be excited about using those skill sets to improve our operations.
• You are a maximizer - you continue to set the bar higher for yourself and those you work and partner with.
• You thrive in high pressure, high stakes environments. You have natural drive and you work hard. You maintain early stage startup intensity at any scale.
• You’re not afraid to disagree, and yet you can also comfortably admit when you were wrong.
• You are skeptical, peek around corners effectively and continuously, and you are right the first time most of the time.

About The Growth Team

We have five principles that describe our approach:

• Holistic thinking: We know that nothing exists in a silo.
• Disciplined prioritization: We need to bring perspective, clarity and guidance to the team.
• Data-driven decision-making: We use first principles and are skeptical. We establish context.
• Proactive collaboration: We build vast common knowledge and encourage synchronous, streamlined work from our colleagues and diversity in problem-solving.
• Execute for impact: We are responsible for the growth of the business and the perception of our brand. We are resilient, accountable and relentless.

Office Guidelines

We are an in-office culture, made of in-office people who thrive on the collaboration and magnetism of working in a shared space. We are seeking individuals who excel in this type of environment, where being present fosters deeper connections and engagement.

Our DEI Philosophy:

Our company’s mission is rooted in deep, genuine care for dogs – and for the people who love them. As an organization we are full of individuals who are unique in many ways, but all united in a mission of providing true peace of mind to dog lovers everywhere. Fixing this industry and improving the lives of pets and their people will be a difficult, decades-long endeavor. We believe the best use of our time, energy, and resources as a collective team is to focus on this mission, and on supporting our team to do their best work and be their best selves. In support of this we’re committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce, and investing in internal structures, opportunities, hiring/promotions processes, and training that create and sustain an inclusive team. We strive to provide an experience at TFD that will be invested, meaningful and memorable as we progress on the journey to reimagine how we feed and care for our pets.

A Few of Our Best Benefits

• Dog-friendly office in Greenwich Village
• Market-competitive compensation and equity packages
• Comprehensive Healthcare, Dental, and Vision
• Company supported mental health benefits
• 12 week paid parental leave
• Competitive 401k plan with company match
• Flexible PTO 
• Discounted fresh food for your pup
• Your pet interrupting video calls (and in-person meetings) is now a feature, not a bug

We commit to building a competitive compensation package and company environment for all individuals to thrive. We believe in competitive base compensation rooted in location specific market data and performance along with equity ownership in the company that allows every team member to build their personal wealth as the company grows, just as much as we believe in fostering a culture that supports our team members personally, professionally, and holistically. For this role the anticipated hiring base compensation range is $180,000 - $205,000 USD Annual and the compensation offered will include a robust market competitive package of base, bonus and equity. In addition to your base compensation offer you will also receive equity ownership in the company. More information about the value of this equity will be shared at the time of offer. This range is representative of NYC Market Data if you are applying to this role outside of the NYC area the range may change.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The Farmer's Dog, Inc. is an equal employment opportunity employer and does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic or status. For more information, please visit Know Your Rights.