Project Manager - Product Discovery

We are looking for an experienced, execution-focused Project Manager who is passionate to join, participate, and contribute to the Product Discovery team — the search experience that helps customers and store team members find the right parts across approximately 8,000 AutoZone retail stores. This position will keep a small, highly technical engineering team moving: managing the sequencing of work and executing within budget and timelines, following our company policies and culture.

In addition, we expect this Project Manager to work closely with business leaders, understand short- and long-term goals, and collaborate on plans to achieve them by delivering leading-edge systems using a combination of Agile and traditional methodologies in conjunction with a highly motivated team. Because Product Discovery supports multiple markets, readiness to coordinate across multi-regional, cross-functional teams is valued.

Our ideal candidate is exceptionally organized, fluent in Jira, and disciplined with project financials. You do not need to write code, but you should be willing to learn enough about how parts search works to coordinate the team confidently and translate technical progress into clear business language. The candidate should be able to implement and maintain sound processes, standards, and governance, and to follow the best practices established within the organization. 

• Initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and deliver projects on the team’s two-week sprint cadence, from initiation through closeout
• Lead daily/weekly stand-ups and Agile ceremonies — sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives
• Own backlog and board management in Jira — well-formed tickets, accurate statuses, and current sprint boards the whole team can trust
• Coordinate the sequencing of interdependent workstreams and releases so work lands in the right order and nothing blocks downstream
• Manage multi-track initiatives that run parallel workstreams toward clear go/no-go decision points
• Develop, manage, and control deadlines, budgets, and scope
• Own the recurring financial rhythm: monthly forecasts, weekly financial summaries, and vendor/staff-augmentation cost tracking against plan
• Apply change, risk, and resource-management techniques as needed
• Manage and communicate Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies (RAID) in a timely manner during project execution
• Manage cross-team dependencies, including the upstream data and catalog teams whose work feeds Product Discovery
• Maintain an open-questions / decisions register and drive each item to a documented closure
• Manage stakeholders’ communications, translating technical status into clear business updates for merchandising, digital, and leadership
• Manage the main project documentation such as initiation documents, closeout documents, monthly financial forecasts, weekly financial summaries, and weekly status reports
• Work within AutoZone PMO-defined policies/procedures and execute them during each phase of the project
• Capture KPIs and delivery metrics (velocity, burndown, cycle time) and effectively communicate them to stakeholders
• Coordinate vendor relationships with staff augmentation, implementation partners, and SaaS solution providers as needed
• Ability to work unsupervised, with little management oversight
• Will report to the IT Manager, Product Discovery 
•  

• Bachelor’s degree in management, information systems, computer science, or a relevant field
• Experience in the retail industry preferable; familiarity with one or more of merchandising, supply chain, or digital is a plus
• 5+ years of project management experience delivering technology projects with cross-functional teams
• Demonstrated fluency in Jira — boards, backlogs, sprint reports, and dashboards — used day to day, not just in theory
• Strong budget and financial-management skills: forecasting, variance tracking, and vendor cost management (essential to this role)
• Exceptional organizational and documentation discipline — you keep the plan, the numbers, and the status straight
• Hands-on experience running Agile ceremonies; Scrum or SAFe familiarity strongly preferred
• Experience with budget, scope, and schedule management
• Excellent organizational, communication, and problem-solving skills
• Demonstrated experience facilitating meetings at multiple levels of an organization, with an understanding of facilitation techniques
• Comfort learning a technical domain well enough to coordinate confidently — no coding required
• Excellent knowledge of MS Office and working knowledge of project-management software (Jira required; MS Project, etc.)
• Readiness to work with cross-functional and, where needed, multi-regional teams
• Good business and financial-management skills