Vice President, Product Management, Research & Experience Design

Foot Locker•New York, NY

2d•$330,000 - $400,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Foot Locker is seeking a Vice President to lead product management, user research and experience design across its multi-brand, international retail landscape, spanning customer-facing, associate-facing and business-operational capabilities. The role connects technology investment to measurable business results and works with business partners to identify opportunities where technology can create value. Its focus is strategy, alignment and value across the business; Engineering owns delivery throughput and production reliability. The Vice President curates the portfolio with Business and Engineering, shapes and validates solutions, drives adoption with business sponsors, and demonstrates investment outcomes. This hybrid role is based at Foot Locker's New York office, with an expected in-office schedule of three days per week, typically Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The Vice President will lead the product dimension of Foot Locker's transition toward AI-enabled software delivery and its integration with DICK'S Sporting Goods. The role will help determine how ideas are selected, solutions are shaped and validated, and impact is demonstrated, moving the function beyond requirements definition toward rapidly creating, testing and iterating solutions. The position sets the experience vision for AI-enabled customer and associate interactions, including conversational, visual, voice and agent-driven experiences. It leads product strategy across digital and store journeys and operational domains, establishes an evidence-based impact management approach, and builds and develops the organization for the evolving operating model. Success includes improving the speed of idea validation, connecting technology investment to business outcomes, strengthening availability and operational capabilities, and balancing new value creation with the health and modernization of existing products.

Requirements

Deep, practical understanding of retail operations and business domains, including stores, merchandising, planning and allocation, inventory, order management, fulfillment, distribution, logistics, customer care, loyalty and digital commerce.
Executive leadership experience in Product Management, business strategy, retail operations or technology, with accountability for enterprise-scale strategy, roadmaps, adoption and measurable business outcomes.
Demonstrated ability to lead Product Management, User Research and Experience Design as integrated capabilities for customer, associate and business-operational audiences and multimillion-dollar portfolios, while increasing Design and Research influence on decisions.
Demonstrated experience changing how an agile product or technology organization operates, with clear evidence of what changed and how the new model was adopted.
Demonstrated experience measuring and attributing the business impact of technology investments, including when controlled experiments are not feasible, in partnership with Finance and Data Analytics.
An informed point of view on how interaction changes when AI mediates it, hands-on familiarity with AI prototyping, and a record of hiring and empowering strong Product, Design and Research leaders.
Demonstrated success identifying and advancing initiatives with business partners that created measurable value.
Demonstrated ability to balance new value creation with reliability, support, modernization and technical debt.
Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Marketing or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Multi-brand, multi-region or international leadership experience.
Experience leading Product Management, User Research, Experience Design, business strategy, retail operations or technology in a complex retail environment.
MBA or other relevant advanced degree.
Experience leading through acquisitions or major platform and operating-model integrations.

Responsibilities

Set the experience vision, strategic direction and expected outcomes for AI-enabled interactions, working with design and research leadership to guide execution.
Define how customers and associates interact with Foot Locker through conversation, images, voice and AI agents, and design products and services to be legible and trustworthy to both people and agents.
Establish AI behavior and trust principles, including agent autonomy, explanations, handoffs to people and user control.
Provide associates with AI assistance for stock information, customer context and next-best actions at the point of service.
Lead service design for connected digital and store journeys, including discovery, reservation, visits, pickup and returns.
Partner with Creative Services and Brand Management on cohesive branded experiences and build a shared design system that supports adaptive, AI-generated interfaces while preserving brand identity.
Build and scale a continuous user research practice, including interviews, store ethnography, associate shadowing and usability testing; study AI use and differences in expectations across brands, markets and communities.
Connect pre-launch research with post-launch Impact Ops so the organization learns continuously.
Define, in partnership with Engineering and Technology leadership, how product management, research and design operate in an AI-enabled delivery model; test changes in selected teams and scale what works.
Redefine problem selection, specification development and validation, and product quality evaluation; use AI-generated working prototypes to validate solutions with customers, associates and stakeholders before specifications are finalized.
Curate an aligned strategy and roadmap with leaders across customer, associate, store, merchandising, supply chain, marketing, brands and international business, linking needs across the operational value chain to measurable results.
Bring business leaders technology opportunities grounded in research, operational data, impact results and AI capabilities, and develop promising ideas jointly.
Maintain the idea-scoring framework and Impact Likelihood Assessment with business leaders and Engineering.
Ensure every funded initiative has a named business sponsor, a jointly agreed hypothesis, success threshold and stop criteria; stop work jointly when it does not meet those criteria.
Hold business sponsors accountable for adoption and outcomes, not merely launch.
Design the loyalty, personalization and promotional experience, including AI-personalized offers and customer control and understanding of the data and preferences used.
Own the product agenda across store systems and operations, merchandising, planning and allocation, supply chain, inventory, order management, fulfillment, digital commerce and international business capabilities.
Partner with Customer Care on agent assist, self-service and returns to improve service quality and cost to serve.
Build Impact Ops by agreeing with business leaders on impact measures, baselines and metric ownership; setting launch instrumentation standards; and establishing regular reviews and Business Impact Retrospectives, with Analytics measuring and Finance validating.
Build impact literacy across Product, Engineering and the business, and use accumulated evidence to improve future Impact Likelihood Assessments and anticipate value.
Maintain the value network, including core technology investment, and report unsuccessful outcomes as well as successes.
Partner with DICK'S Sporting Goods teams on integration of teams, platforms and processes as scope and timing are defined; shape integration decisions and adopt shared platforms and standards where beneficial while balancing commitments with Foot Locker priorities.
Assess the organization, clarify leadership roles and capability needs, reskill where appropriate, hire to address material gaps, and evolve structure, talent and agile ways of working as the operating model matures.
Balance new value creation with reliability, support, modernization and technical debt, particularly in operationally intensive portfolios such as Supply Chain.