Culinary Portfolio Manager, Cuisinart

Cuisinart•Stamford, CT

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Cuisinart is seeking a highly strategic and operationally strong Culinary Portfolio Manager to drive cross-category alignment, portfolio governance, and enterprise-level innovation execution. This role ensures that strategy, financial planning, and execution discipline are aligned across all categories. The Culinary Portfolio Manager will partner closely with Product, Finance, Engineering, Marketing, and Global teams to bring rigor, clarity, and visibility to our portfolio strategy, investment decisions, and innovation processes. This is a highly visible role with direct exposure to executive leadership and board-level materials. Cuisinart is entering a new chapter—evolving toward a consumer-led, innovation-driven organization with greater financial discipline and cross-functional clarity. The Culinary Portfolio Manager will be a key architect of that transformation—ensuring our innovation investments are strategically prioritized, financially grounded, and operationally executable

Requirements

5+ years of experience in portfolio management, strategy, product management, or business operations (consumer products preferred).
Strong financial acumen; comfort with P&L, margin modeling, and investment prioritization.
Experience building executive-level presentations and board materials.
Familiarity with PLM systems and stage-gate product development processes.
Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives in matrixed organizations.
Highly analytical, structured thinker with strong storytelling capability.
Systems-oriented and process-minded, but pragmatic.
Comfortable operating at both strategic and operational levels.
Influences without authority and drives alignment across functions.
Thrives in transformation environments.
Balances rigor with speed.

Responsibilities

Architect the Enterprise Portfolio: Lead cross-category portfolio planning to ensure innovation investments ladder up to regional and global financial targets, growth platforms, and margin expansion goals.
Drive Capital Allocation Discipline: Partner with Finance to govern innovation budgets, track investment performance, and optimize resource allocation across categories and geographies.
Prioritize for Impact: Establish clear portfolio prioritization frameworks grounded in consumer impact, strategic fit, ROI thresholds, and capacity constraints.
Own Portfolio-Level Financial Modeling: Build and maintain multi-year financial models evaluating revenue contribution, gross margin expansion, working capital impact, and capital deployment efficiency.
Integrate Strategy into Planning Cycles: Embed portfolio governance into AOP, LRP, and QBR processes—ensuring pipeline health, risk visibility, and financial accountability are transparent to executive leadership.
Develop executive-ready board decks and strategic presentations that clearly articulate portfolio performance, risks, and investment priorities.
Synthesize complex product, financial, and operational inputs into clear narratives for senior leadership.
Resolve major cross-functional process gaps impacting speed, clarity, & accountability.
Lead implementation / optimization of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems.
Drive the Product/Stage Gate PMO framework and system implementation
Serve as liaison for collective Product Team interacting with other cross functional depts.
Drive transparency across project timelines, interdependencies, and execution risks.
Enable consistent communication across global teams.