Director, Data Products

New Balance•Boston, MA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Data Products is responsible for building and leading New Balance’s enterprise data product capabilities – ensuring that every digital product is underpinned by accurate, well-governed, and business-ready data. Reporting to the VP, Data & AI, this leader owns the strategy, team, and operating model that delivers data as a managed product with clear ownership, measurable quality, and defined consumers. The Director will lead a team of Data Product Owners, aligned to New Balance’s key data domains, and Data Leads aligned to our Digital Product teams. They will set a vision for the data product, set OKR’s, develop roadmaps and ensure stakeholder alignment for each enterprise data domain. The Data Leads will be embedded with digital product teams where they partner directly with the Digital Product Managers to ensure product-level data accuracy, quality, and business readiness.

Requirements

Strategic leadership: Demonstrated ability to translate enterprise strategy into an executable roadmap, define success measures, and drive sustained outcomes in a complex, cross-functional environment with decisions that meaningfully impact business performance.
Retail and/or e-commerce domain fluency: Experience delivering data capabilities that support consumer journeys and merchandising/commercial processes (e.g., product, customer, inventory, pricing, promotions, fulfillment) and partnering with digital product teams.
AI enablement mindset: Working knowledge of AI/ML and GenAI concepts, including what is required to scale AI responsibly (data readiness, evaluation/measurement, risk controls, human-in-the-loop, monitoring) and ability to translate business problems into data/AI solution approaches.
Data integrity and governance capability: Experience partnering with governance, architecture, and engineering teams on data quality management, master/reference data concepts, metadata/catalog, lineage, privacy, and controls; able to balance enablement with risk management.
Strong decision-making and execution: Ability to synthesize complex and sometimes contradictory information, make timely recommendations, and drive execution through others; comfortable facilitating trade-offs and navigating ambiguity and legacy constraints.
Exceptional communication and influence: Executive-ready storytelling and facilitation skills; able to run business and technical briefings, align diverse stakeholders, and create a transparent flow of information across levels and functions.
Collaboration and inclusion.: Track record of building partnerships across organizational boundaries, creating an environment where diverse perspectives are sought and valued, and removing barriers that prevent teams from working toward shared objectives.
Talent and capability development: People leadership experience and/or demonstrated ability to lead through influence—coaching teams, enabling adoption, and building a culture of continuous learning and data literacy.
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, Data/Analytics, Engineering, or a related field required; Master’s degree (MBA, MS) preferred.
Familiarity with modern data platforms (cloud data warehouse/lakehouse), data modeling, data integration patterns, BI/semantic layers, experimentation/measurement, and governance tooling (catalog/lineage); comfort working with Agile/iterative delivery approaches

Responsibilities

Define and Drive the Data Products Strategy & Operating Model: Establish the vision, principles and operating model for managing data as a product across New Balance. Define the portfolio of enterprise data products and ensure each has clear ownership, quality standards, service level expectations, and engaged consumers and stakeholders. Partner with consumers, digital product teams, and engineering to continuously evolve and embed the operating model.
Lead Data Product Owners for Enterprise Data Domains: Develop and maintain a clear data product vision and corresponding OKRs that align desired outcome across stakeholder groups. Partner with business owners and Digital Product Managers to understand priorities and uncover opportunities to build capabilities that increase adoption and deliver value. Build, prioritize, communicate, and champion data product roadmaps across Business Transformation, Engineering, and business stakeholder groups.
Build a High Performing Team of Data Leads Supporting our Digital Products: Manage the team of Data Leads supporting each Digital Product to embed data quality standards in products based on the framework established by the Enterprise Data Governance team. Build and embed the operating model for Data Leads to work with Digital Product Teams, Engineering, Data Product teams, Enterprise Data Governance, and Business Transformation programs. Champion data standards in agile quarterly planning, sprint planning, and retrospectives. Partner with Enterprise Data Governance, Platform, and Architecture teams to operationalize monitoring, alerting, and remediation workflows for data quality. Champion the use of AI to ensure data quality standards are met for Data & Digital Products. Measure and communicate data quality improvements to business stakeholders and executives to build trust in data.