Associate Director, Returns & Incident Resolutions

As Operations, we aim to avoid non-perfect orders. However, given our customers cannot touch and feel products prior to purchase, and fulfilling online orders is operationally complex, some returns and incidents are unavoidable. How we manage these returns and incidents impacts Wayfair’s brand health, our customers’ loyalty, and our profitability. Further, it supports our suppliers and matters for our social responsibility agenda. 

Our Incident Resolutions team works with cross-functional partners to drive new approaches and processes that deliver end-to-end cost and customer experience improvements. This work is business critical, complex, and highly cross-functional. To help us build customer trust and value in this process, Wayfair is looking for an Associate Director level, Technical Program Manager to organize and execute strategic, technology initiatives to reduce Wayfair’s cost of resolving incidents while maximizing customer happiness. 

In this role, you will be managing the lifecycle of complex, cross-functional technical programs that span multiple teams in support of a larger business objective. These programs could look like: scaling an existing low-cost resolution or launching a new resolution for cost reduction or a delightful customer experience. We look to you to help us build out a broad menu of high-performing resolution paths for our customers, Wayfair’s profitability, and social responsibility. You will be accountable for defining this program’s mission/vision and strategy, as well as owning the delivery of the program by engaging directly with multiple product managers, engineers, and business partners throughout different organizations. 

An ideal candidate will be innovative (both with technology and in getting things done), highly influential, and able to steer through ambiguity. 

What You’ll Do:

• Define the mission, vision, and strategy for your program; setting the objectives, analyzing the data to inform decisions, driving outcomes, and influencing the resourcing allocation for your key initiatives to ensure they get done.
• Drive the creation of scalable, cross-cutting, solutions from concept to delivery with your cross-functional technology partners; you’ll be able to zoom into the weeds of a solution or back out to communicate constraints and target outcomes to C-level leadership.
• Create plans that have clear, measurable success criteria, and clearly communicate progress, confidence, learnings, and results.
• Simplify complexity for the team, drive smart tradeoff decisions, and deliver incremental value for the initiative with many different product & engineering teams.
• Force multiply the efforts of many teams to deliver impact by removing bottlenecks for them before they become roadblocks, optimizing working models, and instrumenting repeatable processes.
• Own the prevention of traditional failures: bad understanding of the customer/business problem, weak collaboration between teams, interdependencies not being mapped early and often, weak technical solutioning (debt), scaling limitations, gaps in testing, or unclear success measurement.
• Communicate and align with senior leadership, both within the Product, Business, Engineering and Operational organizations. You will effectively paint with context and drive high quality decisions.

What You’ll Need:

• 10+ years of experience in technical program management, software engineering, software product management, or software development management.
• A track-record of shipping complicated, cross-cutting, software solutions (products, systems, services, features) in an agile environment.
• A deep understanding of distributed systems and scalable solutions; you’ll be expected to help contribute to the design and development of new platforms and capabilities with your software engineering peers. 
• An entrepreneurial mindset, with a bias for customer focused innovation. You will need to present the customer context and opportunities to engineering teams and connect multiple moving parts  holistically for functional groups.
• Excellent ability to communicate with and influence a highly cross functional team and a broad set of stakeholders by leveraging data into actionable insights, clear opportunities, and viable solutions.
• An ability to deal with ambiguity and define the technical strategic direction for the program. Be able to communicate effectively at all levels in the organization.