Director of Product Management

Reporting to the VP of Ecommerce & Digital Products, the Director, Digital Product Management drives the ideation, development, and support of digital capabilities and experiences through the Caesars.com and Caesars Rewards digital loyalty platform which encompass websites, apps, bots, voice, and emerging digital channels focusing on hospitality experiences. The Caesars Entertainment Ecommerce and Digital Product team delivers exciting digital customer experiences across a wide set of product modalities that fuel the imaginations and eliminates friction for our guests at home, at our resorts, or on the go. Our iconic global brands include Caesars Palace, Eldorado, Flamingo, Horseshoe, The LINQ, Harrah’s, Tropicana, Planet Hollywood, Paris, Nobu Hotel, and many more.

The Director, Digital Product Management will lead team members to realize and execute the vision for the on-property guest experience for Headless eCommerce Sites, eCommerce App capabilities, Search & Generative AI Engine Optimization, along with Content Management Systems and their Services.

This role is responsible for coaching and leading teams of product managers / owners and their teams who are breaking down and translating guest experiences and their digital product enablers into various artifacts including user journeys, story maps, wireframe/prototype designs, user stories and technical specifications to propel the product forward from concept through development. In addition, this leader will be accountable for their team’s successful launch of digital product capabilities and measurement, as well as continuous optimization through the life of the capability.

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record and deep understanding of eCommerce, digital product management principles, and user experience design with respect to responsive web, mobile, native application, and web engineering, as well as the ability to provide guidance and leadership towards the development of guest-facing experiences. The Director will be responsible for fostering consistent application development with digital product design principles, patterns, and shared code libraries to ensure efficient and scalable product development. The candidate must be able to clearly collaborate with and “bring along” multiple departments, product teams, and vendor/ partners simultaneously, and excel in a fast-paced environment. They will identify, nurture, and leverage threads across disparate departments and partners.

The role will provide direct leadership over the agile product teams who bring our products to market, leading multiple scrum teams each consisting of 5-10 employees, contractors, and vendors as digital products and initiatives are proposed, designed, developed and launched. The candidate must have the leadership acumen and drive to direct teams that ideate and deliver high-quality digital products for our customers, by cultivating a culture of data-driven and end-user focused product design, engineering, delivery and innovation.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Product Strategy: Provides leadership within a set of digital product capabilities, across our brands and all touch points, including concept, roadmap, design, front-end development, launch and ongoing optimization. Partner and collaborate closely with stakeholders from the various properties/brands and across Caesars Entertainment to understand how to adapt and continually improve the strategy of our digital products based on the objectives of each point of the guest journey.

Product Definition: Coaches matrixed teams across multiple departments in the realization of the vision / concept of a digital product or set of capabilities by connecting multiple customer / employee touch points (research, feedback, etc.), and business drivers, with a guest-first focus. Provide leadership to ensure that the product specifications that are created enable a desirable, feasible and viable product for the relevant end-user. In addition, the Director must ensure their product teams deeply understand guest empathy and convey that to the wider team /company via storytelling to define the “what” and “why” a feature must be built.

Product Readiness: Coaches the product managers / owners to groom a feature backlog and drive a product feature/user story to the agreed definition of “ready” via story mapping, quality writing of user stories along with their acceptance criteria, and through the approval of high-fidelity designs or prototypes to keep the scrum team loaded with a groomed backlog of work to properly enter a sprint to deliver the highest value.

Product Delivery: The Product Director is ultimately accountable for the execution of digital features that are conceived and developed and is responsible for the on-time and on-quality delivery of a specific set of product capabilities through careful prioritization and team review.

Product Communication : Provides frequent communication to the department leadership on development progress, elevating any issues that could impact the budget, timeline, or strategic vision. The Director, Product Management must foster a highly collaborative group, where cross-discipline communication is paramount to the successful delivery of the product with the ethos that “bad news must travel faster than good.”

Product Delivery Standards: Partnering with the VP of eCommerce, creates the eCommerce digital principles, standards and practices (through product definition, product design and product engineering) and is responsible for ensuring that all teams within her/his product management scope apply those practices to their various work and continually aid in the active validation and evolution of those practices.

Product Quality: Oversees their product managers/owners defect backlog to ensure that priorities adhere to the strategic direction of the product, while pushing the product to zero defects. Ensures the quality execution of creative assets developed in support of a feature, such as the visual design, content strategy and copywriting through the coordination with external department directors. Ultimately responsible for the delivery of a defect - free product to the customer.

Product Roadmap: Leads the Product Management team in creation, updates, and communication of the overall product roadmap containing her/his product feature sets – and collaborates with other product leadership to develop the overall product roadmap for all products. Works in close collaboration with the VP of eCommerce to develop the annual operating plan for a digital product or set of digital product capabilities, including advocating for the appropriate level of funding necessary to meet the rapid adoption of digital products by customers and employees.

Financial Responsibilities:

The Director, Product Management has the responsibility to manage and control resources and development costs and build product capabilities that will exceed revenue targets which determine the financial success of the product.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of 12 years in an eCommerce, digital product, design or engineering role, at least 4 years in a Product Leadership role

• Bachelor’s degree required, with a MS/MBA or other relevant advanced degree preferred

• Significant experience in leading teams/organizations in bringing high quality digital products to market

• Experience with Headless content management systems, content strategy, and analytics

• Experience with Figma, Builder.io, Workato, and Akeneo a Plus

• Demonstrable portfolio of eCommerce products in market

• Experience with JIRA/Confluence or similar Agile collaboration tools

• Strong knowledge of the online travel, gaming, retail industry, and travel/tourism in general is a plus

• CSPO Certification, Safe Certification a Plus
  

Knowledge and Skills:

The ideal candidate will possess a combination of communication and product skills at the enterprise level. This role requires that the candidate have a proven track record of leading scrum teams through ideation, design and delivery of complex consumer facing products.

Product Depth:

• Deep knowledge and extensive experience in leading teams in the development of Web and mobile solutions, with a deep understanding of how to get consumer-centric solutions to market with a high degree of success.

• Experience leading product, design and engineering teams through a product development lifecycle that leverages agile principles yet recognizes constraints in an environment that has antiquated legacy systems and a mix of new technologies.

• Ability to effectively traverse across a multi-faceted delivery system, that spans product definition, design and engineering across front-end user interfaces, middleware or micro-services and back-end systems.

• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to communicate effectively and sell ideas and concepts into digital and business leaders.

• A distinct point of view on user experience design and the ability to employ design thinking methods to solve problems and apply the right solution for a given problem.

Result Driven:

• Proven ability to collaborate with and achieve actionable results through others, plus the ability to build strong and sustainable relationships, and the capability to interact with all levels of the organization.

• Ability to grasp the complexities of the business, customer, and employee and effectively translate that into a product that drives measurable results.

• Ability to think strategically and drive ideas into action.

• A positive outlook and willingness to act as a servant-leader and model for high-performing teams.