Sr Director, Business Analytics

Panera Bread•Newton, MA

5d•$207,723 - $290,812

About The Position

The Senior Director of Business Analytics is a strategic leader responsible for enabling the organization to deeply understand sales performance and to drive growth through data-driven decision making. This role owns sales planning and forecasting, product and promotional performance analysis, and a robust market test-and-learn capability to inform scalable commercial strategies. This leader partners closely with Marketing, Finance, Operations, and Insights to translate data into actionable insights and ensure analytics directly influence business outcomes.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in business analytics, commercial analytics, FP&A, or strategy (QSR, retail, or CPG preferred)
Strong expertise in sales analytics, forecasting, promotional effectiveness
Proven experience designing and interpreting market tests and pilots
Deep understanding of P&L drivers and unit economics
Ability to influence senior leaders through clear, data-driven storytelling

Responsibilities

Sales Performance Analytics Lead enterprise-wide analysis of sales performance across markets, channels, dayparts, and customer segments
Develop analytics frameworks to diagnose drivers of growth, gaps, and variability across the system
Deliver executive-ready insights that clearly articulate what is happening, why it is happening, and what actions to take
Own sales planning and forecasting processes, including annual, quarterly, monthly and rolling forecasts
Build scalable forecasting models incorporating historical trends, seasonality, promotions, pricing, and external factors
Partner with Finance to align sales forecasts with financial plans and enterprise targets
Lead analytics for product launches, menu changes, pricing initiatives, and promotional campaigns
Measure incremental impact of promotions and marketing investments
Provide fact-based recommendations to optimize product mix, promotional cadence, and value architecture
Establish and lead a disciplined market test-and-learn framework to evaluate new products, promotions, pricing, and operational initiatives
Design and oversee market tests, pilots, and controlled experiments to isolate incremental impact
Partner with Marketing, Operations, and Development to define test objectives, success metrics, and rollout criteria
Translate test results into clear recommendations on scaling, iteration, or discontinuation
Build organizational confidence in test-and-learn as a core decision-making capability
Oversee development of dashboards, reporting tools, and self-service analytics to improve visibility and speed to insight
Ensure consistency in metric definitions and performance measurement across the organization
Advance analytics maturity through automation, standardization, and best-practice methodologies
Lead and develop a high-performing team of analytics professionals
Set clear priorities, coach talent, and foster a culture of accountability and curiosity
Partner with Data Science and Data Engineering teams to scale advanced analytics capabilities