Merchandise Planning Transformation Product Manager

Our Product Managers help shape REI’s product vision and deliver experiences that are inspiring, inclusive, human, purposeful, and trustworthy. This role contributes to REI’s success as a strategic and execution‑focused Product Manager for the merchandise planning, supporting our enterprise, multi‑year Merchandise Planning Transformation (MPT) program. This role will focus on the assortment planning area, while also ensuring alignment and integration with adjacent merchandise planning functions, including demand planning, allocation and replenishment, merchandise financial planning, supply planning, and space planning. MPT is a critical, cross‑divisional initiative driving significant people, business process and technology transformation across REI’s merchandising organization. It is a foundational enabler for both the Co‑op’s day‑to‑day operations and its long‑term strategic priorities. In this role, you’ll partner closely with cross‑functional teams to bridge business needs and technology capabilities, ensuring the new assortment planning capability delivers meaningful value to the organization. You’ll play a key role in launching, scaling, and continuously improving this capability across Merchandising. You’ll join a fast‑paced, collaborative, and mission‑driven product community where you’re empowered to discover problems worth solving and deliver impactful solutions for Merchandising business users—advancing the mission of the Co‑op. Product Ownership & Strategy

• Own the assortment planning capability and product vision, clearly articulating the roadmap to team members and collaborators.
• Translate product vision into clear, prioritized roadmap requirements, building alignment and buy‑in with business and technical partners.
• Contribute to strategic and quarterly planning by defining priorities, outcomes, and success metrics; conduct retrospectives to inform future decisions.
• Define and track KPIs to measure product performance, adoption, and post‑launch success.

Discovery, Requirements & Delivery

• Lead product discovery using tools such as user interviews, workshops, surveys, data analysis, and journey mapping.
• Develop and maintain a strong working knowledge of current and future merchandising processes, including gaps, pain points, systems, data flows, and integrations.
• Create clear and detailed product requirements, backlog items, epics, user stories, and RFP documentation to enable meaningful feasibility and solution discussions.
• Partner with designers, architects, and engineers to translate user needs into thoughtful product designs and technical solutions.
• Proactively identify dependencies, remove delivery blockers, and support the product team to ensure smooth execution.
• Participate in backlog grooming and prioritization sessions, ensuring alignment and sign‑off from business and development partners.

Launch, Adoption & Optimization

• Support testing activities, including test case development, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and end‑user validation.
• Partner with Change Management to assess impacts, support enablement, and prepare the organization for change.
• Develop end‑user documentation and contribute to training and rollout plans for new capabilities or enhancements.
• Gather feedback from users and stakeholders to inform continuous product improvements and iterations.
• Provide exceptional post‑launch support by triaging issues, resolving defects, and communicating clearly with business users.

Collaboration & Product Practice Leadership

• Work effectively across multiple product teams and collaborators to drive alignment and shared outcomes.
• Partner closely with Technology to design, configure, test, document, and troubleshoot solutions.
• Identify and escalate delivery or implementation risks as needed.
• Advocate for business users while enabling industry‑leading best practices across merchandising disciplines.
• Actively contribute to the ongoing evolution of Product Management practices at the Co‑op.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years’ general Merchandising product experience, including 2+ years’ experience as a Product Manager or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Specific experience with Assortment Planning either as a planner or Product Manager.
• Experience working collaboratively with engineers, data analysts, solution & domain architects.
• Experience designing and executing product discovery and product optimization for internal tools and users.
• Technical fluency; comfort understanding and discussing technology concepts, schedule trade-offs and new opportunities with technical team members.
• Familiarity with fundamental concepts of Systems Thinking.
• Knowledge of data value streams, and ability to identify data quality concerns.
• Experience in building and operationalizing holistic solutions that meet the needs for multiple lines of businesses.
• Proven track record of delivering impactful products / services to a broad customer base in an agile environment.
• Proven ability to leverage data and insights to make informed product recommendations.
• Proven analytical, business process, communication and business acumen skills.
• Demonstrated experience with facilitating business user sessions.
• Demonstrated ability to self-educate and learn while doing.
• Acts upon opportunities and involves and influences others in the accomplishment of worthwhile organizational goals.
• Challenges the status quo, champions change and influences others to change.
• Project management skills including ability to create individual action plans and timelines, and complete action items in a timely manner.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with o9 software and/or o9 implementation.
• Experience with large technology enabled transformation implementations.

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