Manager, Product - Decorator Production Platform

JOIN THE BEST TEAM IN SPORT & SPIRIT

At Varsity Brands, we believe every student deserves the opportunity to succeed and every educator wants to make a difference. It takes a team to make a real impact, and through our two divisions – BSN SPORTS and Varsity Spirit – and our network of 6,000+ employees and independent representatives, we are proud to partner with a wide range of educational institutions and club and professional sports to transform the student journey in SPORT and SPIRIT.

Location: Hybrid - Farmers Branch, TX

HOW YOU WILL MAKE AN IMPACT:

The Manager, Product Management - Decorator Production Platform will own the functional experience, product needs, and continuous improvement priorities for one of Varsity Brands’ primary proprietary applications: Decorator Production Platform application. The Decorator Production Platform application is at the core of the Varsity Brands sporting apparel business strategy that enables apparel and equipment products to be personalized for sports teams, players, and fans.

This role serves as the primary product representative for apparel production application functionality, performance, and processes. This role will partner with business stakeholders, executive leadership, vendor partners, production facility employees, frontline employees, customers, and application-aligned Portfolio Product Owners. The position will identify opportunities, understand business needs, negotiate priorities, and translate objectives into coordinated product initiatives across Varsity Brands.

Portfolio Product Owners are aligned to applications and platforms across Varsity Brands. The Manager, Product Management will partner with the appropriate Portfolio Product Owners so needs are understood, prioritized, and delivered through the relevant application roadmaps. Unresolved conflicts will be elevated to the executive steering committee for final direction.

The Manager, Product Management will guide initiatives from discovery through launch and adoption. This role will remain closely engaged in discovery, requirements, prioritization, testing, release readiness, and post-launch adoption, while maintaining lighter involvement during active software development.

In addition to major initiatives, the role will maintain and prioritize a continuous backlog of smaller enhancements, customer pain points, defects, technical improvements, technical debt reduction, and operational-efficiency opportunities.

Commercial teams retain accountability for revenue and business results. The Manager, Product Management focuses on customer experience, product outcomes, adoption, usability, operational effectiveness, and translating needs into technology-enabled solutions. This role is expected to deliver measurable business outcomes such as efficiency gains, cost reduction, error reduction, and adoption.

WHAT YOU WILL DO:

Team Leadership

• Lead and manage a team of Product Owners and/or Business Analysts responsible for the Decorator Production Platform backlog and delivery
• Translate platform priorities into actionable team objectives and measurable outcomes
• Establish clear team expectations that promote accountability, ownership, collaboration, and product excellence
• Foster an inclusive, high-performing product culture focused on continuous learning and improvement
• Evaluate team capacity, identify resourcing needs, and proactively address delivery risks and impediments
• Coach team members through regular feedback, mentoring, and career development conversations

Experience and Strategy

• Develop and maintain a comprehensive understanding of the Decorator Production Platform process, including vendors, customers, users, business processes, operational needs, pain points, and strategic priorities
• Serve as the primary product representative and advocate for the overall experience and functionality of the Decorator Production Platform Application
• Partner with business stakeholders and executive management to define priorities and obtain final approval for major roadmap decisions
• Translate strategies, customer needs, and operational challenges into clear product opportunities and prioritized initiatives
• Evaluate opportunities based on customer impact, strategic alignment, adoption potential, operational value, effort, risk, dependencies, and expected outcomes
• Maintain a roadmap identifying major initiatives, experience improvements, capability gaps, and cross-application dependencies
• Ensure the production experience remains cohesive when customer journeys span multiple applications, systems, and operational teams

Stakeholder Engagement and Prioritization

• Build strong working relationships with leadership, Operations, Sales, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Marketing, Finance, Technology, and other business functions
• Facilitate discussions to understand competing needs, clarify tradeoffs, and negotiate priorities
• Present recommendations, options, dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs to executive management for review and approval
• Establish transparent prioritization criteria and ensure stakeholders understand how and why initiatives are sequenced
• Communicate roadmap decisions, initiative status, product outcomes, constraints, and changes to appropriate stakeholders
• Escalate unresolved cross-channel, cross-application, or resource conflicts to the executive steering committee
• Support steering committee decisions with clear business context, customer impact, data, dependencies, and alternatives

Partnership with Portfolio Product Owners

• Partner with application-aligned Portfolio Product Owners responsible for other applications and relevant platforms
• Clearly communicate needs, desired outcomes, customer problems, production problems, priorities, and success measures
• Collaborate to determine which applications, platforms, or services should deliver a requested capability
• Ensure requirements are incorporated into appropriate application roadmaps and product backlogs
• Coordinate initiatives requiring changes across multiple products, applications, or delivery teams.
• Participate in cross-portfolio planning to identify dependencies, sequencing requirements, shared capabilities, and conflicts
• Balance needs with enterprise platform strategies, technical sustainability, and the needs of other channels
• Elevate conflicts that cannot be resolved collaboratively to the executive steering committee for final direction

Customer and User Discovery

• Conduct regular discovery with customers, users, vendors, production facilities employees, frontend employees to identify unmet needs, recurring pain points, experience gaps, and improvement opportunities
• Use interviews, observation, surveys, journey mapping, usability testing, feedback sessions, support data, and analytics to gather insights
• Validate that proposed solutions address meaningful customer or operational problems before significant development investment is made
• Partner with SAP, IT, and business teams to develop customer journeys, personas, experience maps, and problem statements
• Evaluate stakeholder requests against customer evidence, usage data, strategic priorities, and broader application needs
• Maintain an organized repository of customer insights, feedback themes, experience gaps, and validated opportunities

Initiative Ownership and Delivery

• Lead application initiatives from initial concept through discovery, prioritization, approval, delivery, launch, and adoption
• Define the business problem, target users, desired outcomes, scope, success measures, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and constraints
• Partner with Business Analysts, UX, Portfolio Product Owners, Architecture, Engineering, and Delivery teams to establish clear requirements and execution readiness
• Participate actively in discovery, solution definition, requirements reviews, roadmap planning, UAT, launch readiness, and post-launch evaluation
• Lead UAT (User Acceptance Testing) planning and execution for Decorator Production Platform initiatives, including defining scope, timelines, and success criteria
• Develop and coordinate UAT test plans and test cases with business stakeholders; facilitate execution and validate results against requirements
• Track defects, prioritize fixes, and confirm production readiness prior to release
• Maintain lighter involvement during active development while remaining available to clarify priorities, answer business questions, review material scope changes, and resolve escalated decisions
• Review proposed solutions to confirm they address the intended need and preserve the desired customer experience
• Support creation and approval of epics, business requirements, user journeys, business rules, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
• Participate in product demonstrations and key milestone reviews
• Coordinate with stakeholders to ensure operational processes, policies, support models, and customer-facing experiences are prepared for launch
• Identify and escalate risks, dependencies, decision gaps, and adoption barriers
• Partner with Delivery and Engineering leaders to understand schedules, constraints, and risks without owning engineering delivery dates or day-to-day development execution

Backlog and Continuous Improvement

• Create, maintain, and prioritize a backlog of improvement opportunities
• Balance strategic initiatives with smaller delivery-ready items
• Include customer pain points, experience enhancements, defects, technical improvements, operational efficiencies, usability improvements, analytics needs, process improvements, and stakeholder requests
• Refine backlog items based on new information, customer feedback, performance data, implementation learnings, and changing business priorities
• Partner with Portfolio Product Owners and technical teams to identify smaller items that can be completed when capacity is available
• Ensure backlog items contain sufficient context, desired outcomes, customer impact, priority rationale, and acceptance expectations
• Retire, combine, or deprioritize items that are no longer aligned with strategy or supported by evidence
• Promote continuous product improvement rather than relying exclusively on large projects

Analytics and Product Performance

• Define success measures and analytics requirements for major initiatives and feature enhancements
• Monitor cost and revenue trends and influenced revenue, conversion rates, customer and user adoption, feature utilization, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score or other experience indicators, customer feedback themes, user behavior and journey completion, defect and support volumes, operational efficiency, cycle time, feature performance, and release outcomes
• Partner with Commercial teams to understand business-performance results while maintaining clear ownership boundaries
• Use analytics to identify experience problems, adoption barriers, underperforming capabilities, and new opportunities
• Develop dashboards, scorecards, or regular performance summaries that provide visibility into application experience and product outcomes.
• Compare actual results with expected outcomes and recommend follow-up improvements when performance does not meet expectations
• Ensure analytics and measurement needs are incorporated into solution requirements before launch
• Combine behavioral analytics with customer feedback and operational insights

Launch, Change Management, and Adoption

• Develop an adoption strategy for new capabilities, features, and experience changes
• Partner with Commercial, Sales, Marketing, Training, Customer Service, Operations, Production, IT, and other teams to prepare for launch
• Help define customer and employee communications, training materials, enablement plans, support resources, FAQs, and launch messaging
• Identify affected audiences and ensure they understand what is changing, why it matters, and how to use the new capability
• Coordinate pilot programs, phased launches, early-adopter feedback, and readiness reviews when appropriate
• Track adoption, utilization, customer response, operational impact, and support needs following launch
• Investigate low adoption or poor performance and lead corrective-action planning
• Recommend adjustments to the product experience, communications, training, process, or rollout strategy based on post-launch results
• Ensure delivered capabilities transition into an effective ongoing operating and support model
• Lead hyper-care support immediately following deployment to ensure successful adoption and stabilization of new capabilities, executing a structured handoff to the appropriate ongoing support team, including documentation, knowledge transfer, and support expectations

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Lead through influence in a matrixed organization without direct authority over business, technology, or delivery teams
• Create alignment among stakeholders with different objectives, incentives, timelines, and levels of technical understanding
• Facilitate productive meetings, decision sessions, prioritization discussions, discovery workshops, and executive reviews
• Communicate complex product and technology topics in clear business language
• Promote fact-based decision-making, customer-centered design, transparent prioritization, and accountability for outcomes
• Ensure alignment of Decorator Production Platform initiatives with enterprise product standards, governance, and architectural direction
• Continuously evaluate and refine governance, standards, and best practices to support a scalable, enterprise-ready Decorator Production Platform
• Share insights and reusable practices

Talent Development and Team Capability

• Recruit, onboard, develop, coach, and retain high-performing Product Owners and/or Business Analysts
• Establish clear performance expectations while providing ongoing coaching, feedback, and professional development
• Create opportunities for team members to expand product and domain expertise and leadership capability
• Foster knowledge sharing, mentoring, and continuous learning across the team
• Recognize performance, address development needs, and build an engaged, collaborative team culture

QUALIFICATIONS:

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Builds engaged, high-performing teams through coaching, mentoring, performance management, and career development
• Establishes clear expectations and promotes accountability while supporting professional growth
• Encourages continuous learning and skill development across the team
• Strong customer orientation and commitment to improving end-to-end digital and operational experiences
• Ability to understand business needs while recognizing broader enterprise and platform considerations
• Ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders without direct reporting authority
• Strong prioritization skills using customer evidence, data, strategic alignment, value, effort, risk, and dependencies
• Excellent communication, presentation, negotiation, and facilitation skills
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, structure complex problems, and move groups toward clear decisions
• Strong analytical skills and ability to interpret product, customer, operational, and commercial data
• Understanding product analytics, adoption measurement, customer feedback, conversion, utilization, and feature-performance evaluation
• Ability to conduct or support customer interviews, user research, journey mapping, surveys, usability testing, and feedback analysis
• Understanding of digital product management, product discovery, roadmaps, backlogs, prioritization, and product delivery lifecycles
• Working knowledge of Agile practices, including epics, user stories, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, UAT, and release planning
• Ability to collaborate with Product, UX, Business Analysis, Engineering, Architecture, Analytics, Delivery, Operations, Sales, and Commercial teams
• Ability to understand technical concepts, system dependencies, integrations, APIs, data flows, and platform constraints at a level sufficient to support product decisions
• Strong organizational skills with a high degree of ownership, follow-through, and accountability
• Ability to manage multiple initiatives, stakeholders, dependencies, and priorities simultaneously
• Ability to balance strategic transformation work with smaller continuous improvement opportunities
• Strong judgment and ability to recognize when decisions or conflicts should be escalated
• Comfortable with financial statements and displays working knowledge of financial and accounting concepts relevant to production cost, margin, and vendor management

Education, Certifications, and Experience

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Product Management, Marketing, Information Systems, Business Analytics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 2-5+ years of experience in Product Management, Manufacturing/Production Systems, Supply Chain, or Digital Product environments
• Previous experience as a product owner, program manager, application owner, or application lead
• 2+ years of experience leading or managing a team with proven ability to coach, develop, and retain talent while fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement

Preferred

• Master of Business Administration preferred. (Standout recent graduates will be considered regardless of experience level
• Relevant experience in product management, product ownership, business strategy, digital commerce, customer experience, business analysis, operations, technology delivery, or a related discipline
• Experience working in a cross-functional or matrixed organization
• Experience with business transformation initiatives
• Experience working with business stakeholders, customers, vendors, production employees, frontline employees, product teams, and technology teams
• Experience using analytics and customer feedback to guide product decisions
• Experience supporting product launches, organizational change, training, communications, or adoption programs

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities required of the employee for this job.

OUR VALUES

Service - We lead with heart. We champion community.

Passion - We love what we do. It fuels our purpose.

Integrity - We do what we promise. We own our actions and decisions.

Respect - We earn it by giving it. Because everyone deserves it.

Innovation - We never stop striving to be better. For ourselves and our community.

Transparency - We are committed to openness and honesty in everything we do.

OUR BENEFITS

We are committed to putting you and your families first. For benefits eligible roles, we offer a variety of choices and costs as well as program enhancements that align with our responsibility to elevate the employee experience. Some of our offerings include:

• Comprehensive Health Care Benefits
• HSA Employer Contribution/ FSA Opportunities
• Wellbeing Program
• 401(k) plan with company matching
• Company paid Life, AD&D, and Short-Term Disability
• Generous My Time Off & Paid Holidays
• Varsity Brands Ownership Program
• Employee Resource Groups
• Access to Financial Coaching and member-owned Credit Union
• St. Jude Partnership & Volunteer Opportunities
• Employee Perks including discounts on personal apparel and equipment!

Eligibility for company-sponsored benefits is determined by scheduled work hours, and the terms of the applicable benefit plans. Benefit offerings and eligibility requirements may vary by position and are subject to change in accordance with plan documents and applicable law.

Varsity Brands companies are equal opportunity employers. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran’s status, age or disability.

Varsity Brands, LLC

RECOGNIZED LEADER IN SPORT, SPIRIT & ACHIEVEMENT
At Varsity Brands, we aim to build school pride, student engagement and community spirit through three unique but interrelated businesses: BSN SPORTS, Varsity Spirit and Herff Jones. Together, we promote personal, school and community pride through customizable products and programs for elementary, middle and high schools as well as colleges, universities and professional sports organizations, churches and corporations.

With more than 6,000 employees and sales partners, our reach spans across North America.
Explore the opportunities at each of our operating units.