Whole Foods Market attracts people who are passionate—about great food, about the communities they live and work in, about how we treat our planet and our fellow humans—and who want to bring their passion into the workplace and make a difference. The Whole Foods Market Tech Team is looking for people who also want to bring their expertise and passion for technology to drive innovation and support Whole Food’s strategic vision.
The Principal Product Manager for Retail systems will define retail solutions for the company, including payment solutions, in-store loyalty features, hospitality, and overall POS experience. The individual is responsible for both defining the vision and measuring the effectiveness and success of the solutions. S/he is responsible for setting strategic direction and is empowered to make necessary decisions to bring the strategy to fruition. This person understands the user and customer needs and the business goals, and collaborates with the architects, engineers, and stakeholders to deliver.
In early development lifecycle stages, the Principal Product Manager will act as an intrapreneur and an entrepreneur within the enterprise. This is a multi-faceted job provides the exciting opportunity to develop new, beneficial products and features that span a multi-year impact on the organization. The Principal Product Manager is critical to the success of Retail and integrated systems and the business teams that leverage them.

Responsibilities

• Understanding the needs of customers, business partners (from Whole Foods Market and Amazon), and technology users.
• Managing and meeting the needs of senior stakeholders, including conducting executive leadership proposal or program reviews in the form of written Word documents, publishing post-launch metrics, and escalating to drive decision-making.
• Serving as the product leader for your projects, setting priorities across the portfolio of launches managed by you, and making investments in improving core services.
• Identifying net new capabilities or architectural investments needed to support and accelerate expansion and working with engineering technology services teams to ensure we create scalable and repeatable solutions.
• Develops an integrated Retail Systems and POS capability and technology product roadmap spanning 3+ months to 3 years, including influencing third-party vendor roadmaps to achieve goals.
• Driving the creation of business cases for all proposed roadmap initiatives, inclusive of detailed costs, ROI valuations, development of success metrics, and alignment to strategic company goals.
• Creating and managing the functional scope of a given program phase and representing the scope in dependent phases.
• Distilling clear requirements from large and diverse sets of customers, partners, vendors, engineering teams, and business entities.
• Performing market research, usability studies, and creating focus groups to identify best-of-breed benchmarks and solves for customer problems.
• Setting up mechanisms for receiving feedback and adjusting priorities to ensure the right customer, technology, and engineering outcomes.
• Monitoring industry and the competition for technical and process changes and advances.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree and 4+ years of relevant experience in business and product management
• 1+ years of experience extracting data using SQL
• 2+ years of advanced Microsoft Excel skills
• Extensive experience in retail store operations, POS, and integrated Retail systems programs
• Experience within the large highly integrated program delivery; grocery business areas a plus
• Strategic technology planning and execution experience as well as policy development and maintenance
• Ability to effectively drive people, process, and technology change in a dynamic and complex operating environment
• Excellent oral and written communication skills. This includes the ability to explain system concepts and technologies to business leaders, as well as business concepts to technologists, and the ability to sell ideas and processes internally at all levels and especially to senior leadership.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills; ability to use hard data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations, and drive actions.
• Strengths in problem-solving, issue-resolution, ability to work in a deadline-driven work environment, high attention to detail, and ability to multitask
• Experience managing or working closely with engineering teams
• Proven experience launching high impact, complex products in a highly matrixed environment
• Expert at creating "working backwards documents" and plans
• Experience managing highly complex greenfield and enterprise level products/programs

Preferred:

• Previous experience at Amazon or Amazon subsidiary working on joint projects with Amazon
• Master’s degree or higher in business, technology or related field; MBA preferred
• 3+ years implementing or using Retail/Point of Sale (POS) preferred

This position is based in Austin; domestic relocation assistance is available. 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.

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.