Sr Product Manager, Technical - Customer Engagement Platform

Los Angeles, CA

Reports To: Director - Product Management

Internal Title: Sr Product Manager

Sweetgreen is looking for a seasoned Product Manager to join our Tech team.  We are looking for a blend of front end and platform experience. As we build our “FoodOS” and we scale, we need a strategic thinker with the creativity to solve our bigger problems in simple ways, the discipline to make hard tradeoffs, in collaboration with team members and stakeholders, and the ability to earn trust with technical and non-technical leaders, including the CTO and CEO.  As a senior individual contributor, we will rely on you to deliver a vision and roadmap for our entire technology stack that powers our customer-facing applications. This includes promotion/loyalty engines, payments, menu representation, underlying orchestration layers, and the evaluation, selection, and management of strategic partners and vendors. These activities are crucial for our goals to grow the sweetgreen impact on the food system through  store growth, customer growth, sales growth,  and setting the stage for major business and brand events sweetgreen chooses to pursue in the near future. 

This role is not about “tell me what to do, and I’ll write the requirements”, this role is about ideating and making the right decisions for our customers, our team, and the company to achieve our mission.

Top Goal - The Sr Product Manager - Platform’s key performance objective is to define and enable the creation of a unified, simplified technology stack that enables the key platform capabilities that fuel sweetgreen customer engagement. In other words, you’ll be responsible for defining the roadmap for our Customer Engagement, Loyalty, Promotion, Payment, Menu, and  Personalization capabilities, managing tradeoffs around flexibility and speed for all stakeholders, with the goal of dramatically cutting down development time for our engineers, improve our ability to engage customers, and increasing options at our marketing team’s disposal.

In addition, in this role you’ll also work with 3rd party platforms and vendors, as well as senior engineers to select the right architecture approach and vendor capabilities required to match the requirements that you’ll have gathered and defined. Given the necessity of understanding both the technical side of things as well as bringing stakeholders along and eliciting tradeoff decisions, it is essential that you have demonstrated the flexibility to go deep in technical details, but at the same time connect such details to the strategic direction you have set and inherited from stakeholders and executives, in ways that are clear to understand and actionable. 

In a typical product development cycle, you will:

• Articulate the strategic direction for the project, circulate it and review it in writing with both business and technical stakeholders
• Lead the tech team to propose different approaches and describe tradeoffs
• Illustrate the tradeoffs among peers and senior executives as to drive to a recommended approach and solution
• Select vendors, if part of the solution
• Execute on the approach by, in partnership with our program management team, leading the engineering team through an agile process and our vendors.
• Relentlessly report key highlights, lowlights and risks and look around corners.

Impact and Milestones

• Within 30 days, you will have familiarized yourself with all systems involved, and have started building relationships with key stakeholders. You will have taken ownership of the existing sprints and participated in the standard agile ceremonies with the team. 
• Within 60 days you will have: 
• Drafted a Platform Simplification vision and roadmap. This document will be reviewed at the CTO level
• Within 90 days you’ll have developed a comprehensive understanding of our current technology stack, taken over ongoing work, and created a strategy for the rest of 2021. 
• Within 90 days you will have influenced the engineering stakeholders to have started the development of the work on your proposals and have established detailed requirements and timelines. Specifically, you should have built a roadmap and product proposals for the first 1-2 features. These product proposals will be reviewed at the CTO and Chief Architect level. 
• Within 120-180 you will have reached the first milestone that you have defined for the above plan, working with engineering, design, and program management.
• By day 90, you’ll start to participate in larger discussions for 2-3 year planning. 

Ongoing

• Maintain a backlog of tech-driven improvements, to be prioritized in collaboration with a rotating mix of product, design, and business stakeholders,  as well as technical teams.
• Oversee large, cross-functional programs and initiatives. Work with our engineering, program and product teams. 
• Write, write, write. We believe that writing brings clarity to thinking, helps discussions and decision making, and reduces misunderstandings and mistakes. You’ll come in as a strong writer already, and you’ll be committed to improving and leading our organization toward higher standards.

Your Accomplishments 

• 5+ years of experience in digital product management role. Ideally a mix of startup + bigger company, but what matters is what you have done. 
• Technical experience: proven track record of having influenced architecture/technical choices at a business unit or company level. 
• Proven experience designing and maintaining a roadmap and executing the vision behind it, complete with tradeoffs, dependencies, and positive returns on investment.
• Ownership bias, collaboration, and results within blended corporate and partner teams
• Track record of delivering data-driven outcomes and insights, as well as influencing business and technology decisions.
• Passionate about food. Ideally, you know what you eat, and you realize how important it is to connect people and communities to real food. Both for people and for the planet.
• Passion for design a plus

What you'll get

• Three different medical plans to suit your and your family's needs
• Dental and Vision insurance
• Flexible PTO plan
• 401k; company match of 50% up to 3% of employee contribution
• 5 months paid family leave; we believe in fully supporting new parents
• Employee HSA and FSA
• Complimentary greens
• An opportunity to make a real impact on the people around you, both by growing them and by connecting them to real food
• To live the sweetlife and celebrate your passion + purpose
• A collaborative family of people who live our core values and have your back
• A clear career path with opportunities for development, both personally and professionally
• Free sweetgreen swag

You and Us, Together

Together we’ll work to accomplish those measures of success. You’ll enjoy competitive pay + bonus, based on your performance and level of experience. You’ll take advantage of a comprehensive health, dental, vision insurance, and 401k plan. And you’ll recharge given flexible time off so that you can make the most of life and work, in harmony.

We’ll provide clear expectations for you in this role. We’ll assign you a career manager so that you can track your progress against those expectations. Together we’ll collaborate to define your career path and find opportunities for growth. We’ll respect and celebrate your passion + purpose, as we all do. And we’ll be a family of people that are all in pursuit of building healthier communities by connecting people to real food.

About sweetgreen

sweetgreen is on a mission to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food. We passionately believe that real food should be convenient and accessible to everyone. Every day in each sweetgreen restaurant, our 4,000+ team members make food from scratch, using fresh ingredients and produce delivered that morning. And in our local communities, we’re committed to leaving people better than we found them. We’re in the business of feeding people, and we’re out to change what that means. Our people are our most valuable ingredient - the heart of our company, the face of our brand, and what truly makes the sweetgreen experience special and unique.

Come join the sweetlife!

sweetgreen provides equal opportunities for everyone that works for us and everyone that applies to join our team, without regard to sex or gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, any service, past, present, or future, in the uniformed services of the United States (military or veteran status), or any other consideration protected by federal, state, or local law.

sweetgreen participates in the federal government's E-Verify program to determine employment eligibility. To learn more about the E-Verify program, please click here.