Vice President, Digital Products

Overview

Major League Soccer is seeking a strong, entrepreneurial leader to oversee our owned digital products to execute our mission and drive revenue and Fan growth across the League. You have a relentless drive and passion to create groundbreaking products and create exponential success as part of a high performing product team. Our ideal candidate has a fascination with opportunities at the intersection between Fan experience, human emotion, technology, innovation, and emerging trends.

Working cross-functionally with our business, strategy, content, and marketing teams, this role will bring cohesion to the end-to-end Fan experience through digital product strategy, identifying growth opportunities and creating measurable value for our Fans and our League through three core principles: a) Fan data acquisition, b) product innovation, and c) personalization.

The ideal candidate promotes a culture anchored in research, data, and experimentation, has courage to take bets and defend them, knows when to adjust and can practice pragmatism in a rapidly changing landscape. The role will require this leader to constantly adapt, learn and reposition the teams to better serve our Fans and will model adaptability by encouraging continuous evolution considering industry trends, emerging solutions, and new insights.

This role is positioned within the Technology organization, which means you have experience leading deeply technical product plans and aligning business strategy with technology delivery.

Responsibilities

• Partner cross-functionally to define the vision, roadmap, and lead delivery of an industry-leading digital Fan product portfolio. Identify, socialize, and deliver new innovative opportunities to disrupt Fan engagement both inside and outside the match.
• Lead all aspects of our digital product technology strategy including planning, prioritization, requirements, experimentation, and execution to achieve critical metrics and optimize end-to-end Fan growth.
• Lead analytical methodologies to growing Digital Product innovation, including emerging features that drive share-of-attention, identification, engagement, nurturing, and retention.
• Size and prioritize new technology opportunities including the business case, path to growth, execution plans, and team buy-in.
• Develop and build measures, metrics and tracking to ensure value is captured from all use cases being developed and deployed. Partner with our Analytic team to design & develop appropriate mechanisms for tracking & performance management (e.g., dashboards, reports)
• Work with our Strategy and Analytics teams to leverage data-driven decisions and experimentation approaches (e.g., A/B testing, hold outs, control groups) to build learning agendas, analyze results, and integrate findings into the organization for on-going planning and objectives and key results adjusting.
• Develop and maintain relationships with key technology vendors, including commercial partners and sponsors, using those relationships to innovate on emerging capabilities and features that can drive Fan engagement.
• Capture and document requirements, manage roadmaps, and prioritize backlog needs while aligning those efforts to ensure marketing, content and digital partners have a full view into the technology pipeline.
• Serve as our digital marketing technology expert, creating a multi-year roadmap for our MarTech stack; engage with key internal collaborators and Clubs to efficiently orchestrate omni-channel journeys.
• Support the management of ongoing forecasting and reporting of the financial performance related to technology programs. Prioritize and deliver on multiple concurrent initiatives that have significant financial impact with a P&L mentality.
• Additional responsibilities as assigned.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s or master’s degree or any combination of education with at least 10+ years of relevant experience in digital products and/or software applications.
• 12+ years overall experience, with a minimum of 5+ years in a senior Product leadership role.
• Experience leading at least one digital product to market, preferably in a fast-moving B2C company with 1M+ users.
• Knowledge and/or hands-on experience with software development lifecycles, cloud-based API-first architectures/platforms, personalization, headless content management, data/analytics, identity, ecommerce, and MarTech architectures.

Qualifications & Experience

• Seasoned authority in building and owning product roadmaps for both the longer term (strategic) and short term (tactical) and getting consensus across the company.
• Strong problem-solving skills to take an ambiguous problem and develop a structured and logical framework to define the problem, analyze data and make actionable recommendations.
• Great written and verbal communication and can successfully spread product thinking throughout the organization; Ability to drive initiatives that substantially increase the team’s impact, influencing decisions and pursuing big ideas through compelling storytelling.
• Propensity to thrive in ambiguity with a flexible operating range and constantly call into question assumptions and biases and motivate teams to do the same.
• Naturally entrepreneurial with a ‘get-stuff-done’ approach; experience in taking measured risks backed by data and strong hypotheses coupled with ‘big picture thinking’ that defines and drives toward a bold future vision for our Fans, Clubs, and the League.
• Ability to be hands-on and go deep on a problem, uncover root causes, and find pockets of opportunity anywhere / everywhere via technology & design principles.
• Can shape the look and feel of an experience based on your vision and taste and identify great design and provide meaningful critiques of discrepancies/opportunities in the team's work.
• High-level of commitment to a quality work product and organizational ethics, integrity and compliance
• Ability to work effectively in a fast paced, collaborative environment
• Good interpersonal skills and the ability to effectively communicate, both verbally and in writing
• Demonstrated decision making and problem-solving skills
• Proficiency in Microsoft Suite
• Ability to travel and to work non-traditional hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays

Total Rewards

Starting Base Salary: $200,000 – $250,000. MLS/SUM base salaries are contingent upon several factors including individual qualifications, market financials, and operational business needs.

We are committed to providing a Total Rewards package that attracts, supports, engages, and retains talent through the following:

• Benefits – comprehensive and competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits, as well as a suite of programs to promote well-being including a $500 Wellness Reimbursement. A generous PTO offering, and hybrid Office/Remote Work Schedule are also offered to promote Work-Life balance.
• Career & Professional Development – on the job training, feedback, and on-going educational opportunities to continue your personal and professional development.
• Employee Engagement – office perks, discounts and employee events that go “beyond the traditional paycheck” to make you feel a part of our team and inspire you to elevate the Game!

We are an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.