Job Type
Full-time
Description
About us:
We're Tovala, a food-tech company completely reinventing home cooking to save consumers time. Through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and food, we give our customers a way to enjoy really good, good-for-you meals without sacrificing time to do whatever matters to them. We've amassed a loyal, rapidly growing following in just a few years, radically changing the day-to-day lives of people across the country and successfully creating a new model for the food industry with best-in-class retention and LTV. We're looking for great people to join our team of hard-working, food-loving nerds.
Job description:
The Manager of Product Development and Menu Innovation is a customer-centric, data-obsessed, and collaborative team member who owns our menu innovation pipeline and works relentlessly to find new ways to add value to our customers.
How you'll spend your time at Tovala:

• Relentlessly seek ways to optimize our portfolio with a focus on customer value and growth.
• Understand our customers' issues, pains, desires, how they think and how they decide to purchase - you marry qualitative insights to understand why customers do what they do with quantitative data to understand what customers are doing.
• Identify new innovation opportunities leveraging research, customer insights, smart customer survey design, trends and data. Data and analytics is how you start your day, every day.
• Conduct research within a complex ecosystem spanning competitors, industry trends, social media, and customer behavior.
• Practice a can-do mindset with strong conviction to convince customers to hire Tovala as their (life changing) meal solution.
• Develop business cases to vet, validate, and prioritize new innovation opportunities.
• Create R&D briefs outlining target, parameters, and timelines for culinary concept ideation.
• Develop testing capabilities to assess new concept prototypes with internal and external testers.
• Showcase deep knowledge of how our business works and what role Product plays. You understand stakeholder constraints and deliver innovation with this in mind.
• Implement a stage-gate process to cross-functionally commerizalize and launch new products, partnering with Marketing, Finance, CS, Operations and Tech teams.
• Monitor, track and assess performance of all new products with a lens towards driving growth, using a customer feedback loop to drive continuous improvements.
• Represent the voice of the customer during the ideation process and In The Kitchen tastings where new concepts are tasted in person to identify possible concerns and opportunities with the customer experience.

About you:

• You have a passion for food and are willing to eat meals created by our chefs.
• You love working in teams and by nature are a curious, yet humble learner who thrives in an ambiguous and fast paced environment.
• Through empathy, service, and an eagerness to learn, you display the highest levels of customer centricity in everything you do.
• You are a smart and intellectually curious quick learner.
• You are creative and think outside of the normal product box to solve problems.
• You are persistent in pushing companies beyond their comfort zones with compelling evidence, data, and collaborative communication.
• You have confidence working with data to build business cases and make recommendations.
• You have outstanding project management skills and business acumen to push projects forward.
• You can manage multiple projects simultaneously with a results-oriented approach.
• You have experience improving processes and are comfortable working with operational teams.
• You have experience launching new products and have a track record of working successfully cross-functionally, especially with R&D and Operations.

Requirements
Requirements:

• 5-10 years experience in Product Innovation or Bran Management, ideally in food
• Experience in product strategy for a well-recognized consumer brand.
• Demonstrated success developing and launching new innovations from concept to delivery, in a scrappy and ambiguous environment.
• Previous exposure to marketing/product marketing would be a strong plus.
• Proven track record of launching new innovations and thriving on seeing new and improved.