{"id":3230336,"url":"https://alion.io/job/varsity-brands-manager-product-decorator-production-platform","title":"Manager, Product - Decorator Production Platform","company":{"id":1880078,"name":"Varsity Brands","domain":"varsitybrands.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/varsitybrands","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.846,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":19,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Product","role_family":"Product","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Farmers Branch, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":49000,"max_usd":97000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":397},"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-23","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T04:41:12Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":13,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":13},"description":"JOIN THE BEST TEAM IN SPORT & SPIRIT\nAt Varsity Brands, we believe every student deserves the opportunity to succeed and every educator wants to make a difference. It takes a team to make a real impact, and through our two divisions - BSN SPORTS and Varsity Spirit - and our network of 6,000+ employees and independent representatives, we are proud to partner with a wide range of educational institutions and club and professional sports to transform the student journey in SPORT and SPIRIT.\nLocation: Hybrid - Farmers Branch, TX\nHOW YOU WILL MAKE AN IMPACT:\nThe Manager, Product Management - Decorator Production Platform will own the functional experience, product needs, and continuous improvement priorities for one of Varsity Brands’ primary proprietary applications: Decorator Production Platform application. The Decorator Production Platform application is at the core of the Varsity Brands sporting apparel business strategy that enables apparel and equipment products to be personalized for sports teams, players, and fans.\nThis role serves as the primary product representative for apparel production application functionality, performance, and processes. This role will partner with business stakeholders, executive leadership, vendor partners, production facility employees, frontline employees, customers, and application-aligned Portfolio Product Owners. The position will identify opportunities, understand business needs, negotiate priorities, and translate objectives into coordinated product initiatives across Varsity Brands.\nPortfolio Product Owners are aligned to applications and platforms across Varsity Brands. The Manager, Product Management will partner with the appropriate Portfolio Product Owners so needs are understood, prioritized, and delivered through the relevant application roadmaps. Unresolved conflicts will be elevated to the executive steering committee for final direction.\nThe Manager, Product Management will guide initiatives from discovery through launch and adoption. This role will remain closely engaged in discovery, requirements, prioritization, testing, release readiness, and post-launch adoption, while maintaining lighter involvement during active software development.\nIn addition to major initiatives, the role will maintain and prioritize a continuous backlog of smaller enhancements, customer pain points, defects, technical improvements, technical debt reduction, and operational-efficiency opportunities.\nCommercial teams retain accountability for revenue and business results. The Manager, Product Management focuses on customer experience, product outcomes, adoption, usability, operational effectiveness, and translating needs into technology-enabled solutions.This role is expected to deliver measurable business outcomes such as efficiency gains, cost reduction, error reduction, and adoption.\nWHAT YOU WILL DO:\nTeam Leadership\nLead and manage a team of Product Owners and/or Business Analysts responsible for the Decorator Production Platform backlog and delivery\nTranslate platform priorities into actionable team objectives and measurable outcomes\nEstablish clear team expectations that promote accountability, ownership, collaboration, and product excellence\nFoster an inclusive, high-performing product culture focused on continuous learning and improvement\nEvaluate team capacity, identify resourcing needs, and proactively address delivery risks and impediments\nCoach team members through regular feedback, mentoring, and career development conversations\nExperience and Strategy\nDevelop and maintain a comprehensive understanding of the Decorator Production Platform process, including vendors, customers, users, business processes, operational needs, pain points, and strategic priorities\nServe as the primary product representative and advocate for the overall experience and functionality of the Decorator Production Platform Application\nPartner with business stakeholders and executive management to define priorities and obtain final approval for major roadmap decisions\nTranslate strategies, customer needs, and operational challenges into clear product opportunities and prioritized initiatives\nEvaluate opportunities based on customer impact, strategic alignment, adoption potential, operational value, effort, risk, dependencies, and expected outcomes\nMaintain a roadmap identifying major initiatives, experience improvements, capability gaps, and cross-application dependencies\nEnsure the production experience remains cohesive when customer journeys span multiple applications, systems, and operational teams\nStakeholder Engagement and Prioritization\nBuild strong working relationships with leadership, Operations, Sales, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Marketing, Finance, Technology, and other business functions\nFacilitate discussions to understand competing needs, clarify tradeoffs, and negotiate priorities\nPresent recommendations, options, dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs to executive management for review and approval\nEstablish transparent prioritization criteria and ensure stakeholders understand how and why initiatives are sequenced\nCommunicate roadmap decisions, initiative status, product outcomes, constraints, and changes to appropriate stakeholders\nEscalate unresolved cross-channel, cross-application, or resource conflicts to the executive steering committee\nSupport steering committee decisions with clear business context, customer impact, data, dependencies, and alternatives\nPartnership with Portfolio Product Owners\nPartner with application-aligned Portfolio Product Owners responsible for other applications and relevant platforms\nClearly communicate needs, desired outcomes, customer problems, production problems, priorities, and success measures\nCollaborate to determine which applications, platforms, or services should deliver a requested capability\nEnsure requirements are incorporated into appropriate application roadmaps and product backlogs\nCoordinate initiatives requiring changes across multiple products, applications, or delivery teams.\nParticipate in cross-portfolio planning to identify dependencies, sequencing requirements, shared capabilities, and conflicts\nBalance needs with enterprise platform strategies, technical sustainability, and the needs of other channels\nElevate conflicts that cannot be resolved collaboratively to the executive steering committee for final direction\nCustomer and User Discovery\nConduct regular discovery with customers, users, vendors, production facilities employees, frontend employees to identify unmet needs, recurring pain points, experience gaps, and improvement opportunities\nUse interviews, observation, surveys, journey mapping, usability testing, feedback sessions, support data, and analytics to gather insights\nValidate that proposed solutions address meaningful customer or operational problems before significant development investment is made\nPartner with SAP, IT, and business teams to develop customer journeys, personas, experience maps, and problem statements\nEvaluate stakeholder requests against customer evidence, usage data, strategic priorities, and broader application needs\nMaintain an organized repository of customer insights, feedback themes, experience gaps, and validated opportunities\nInitiative Ownership and Delivery\nLead application initiatives from initial concept through discovery, prioritization, approval, delivery, launch, and adoption\nDefine the business problem, target users, desired outcomes, scope, success measures, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and constraints\nPartner with Business Analysts, UX, Portfolio Product Owners, Architecture, Engineering, and Delivery teams to establish clear requirements and execution readiness\nParticipate actively in discovery, solution definition, requirements reviews, roadmap planning, UAT, launch readiness, and post-launch evaluation\nLead UAT (User Acceptance Testing) planning and execution for Decorator Production Platform initiatives, including defining scope, timelines, and success criteria\nDevelop and coordinate UAT test plans and test cases with business stakeholders; facilitate execution and validate results against requirements\nTrack defects, prioritize fixes, and confirm production readiness prior to release\nMaintain lighter involvement during active development while remaining available to clarify priorities, answer business questions, review material scope changes, and resolve escalated decisions\nReview proposed solutions to confirm they address the intended need and preserve the desired customer experience\nSupport creation and approval of epics, business requirements, user journeys, business rules, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes\nParticipate in product demonstrations and key milestone reviews\nCoordinate with stakeholders to ensure operational processes, policies, support models, and customer-facing experiences are prepared for launch\nIdentify and escalate risks, dependencies, decision gaps, and adoption barriers\nPartner with Delivery and Engineering leaders to understand schedules, constraints, and risks without owning engineering delivery dates or day-to-day development execution\nBacklog and Continuous Improvement\nCreate, maintain, and prioritize a backlog of improvement opportunities\nBalance strategic initiatives with smaller delivery-ready items\nInclude customer pain points, experience enhancements, defects, technical improvements, operational efficiencies, usability improvements, analytics needs, process improvements, and stakeholder requests\nRefine backlog items based on new information, customer feedback, performance data, implementation learnings, and changing business priorities\nPartner with Portfolio Product Owners and technical teams to identify smaller items that can be completed when capacity is available\nEnsure backlog items contain sufficient context, desired outcomes, customer impact, priority rationale, and acceptance expectations\nRetire, combine, or deprioritize items that are no longer aligned with strategy or supported by evidence\nPromote continuous product improvement rather than relying exclusively on large projects\nAnalytics and Product Performance\nDefine success measures and analytics requirements for major initiatives and feature enhancements\nMonitor cost and revenue trends and influenced revenue, conversion rates, customer and user adoption, feature utilization, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score or other experience indicators, customer feedback themes, user behavior and journey completion, defect and support volumes, operational efficiency, cycle time, feature performance, and release outcomes\nPartner with Commercial teams to understand business-performance results while maintaining clear ownership boundaries\nUse analytics to identify experience problems, adoption barriers, underperforming capabilities, and new opportunities\nDevelop dashboards, scorecards, or regular performance summaries that provide visibility into application experience and product outcomes.\nCompare actual results with expected outcomes and recommend follow-up improvements when performance does not meet expectations\nEnsure analytics and measurement needs are incorporated into solution requirements before launch\nCombine behavioral analytics with customer feedback and operational insights\nLaunch, Change Management, and Adoption\nDevelop an adoption strategy for new capabilities, features, and experience changes\nPartner with Commercial, Sales, Marketing, Training, Customer Service, Operations, Production, IT, and other teams to prepare for launch\nHelp define customer and employee communications, training materials, enablement plans, support resources, FAQs, and launch messaging\nIdentify affected audiences and ensure they understand what is changing, why it matters, and how to use the new capability\nCoordinate pilot programs, phased launches, early-adopter feedback, and readiness reviews when appropriate\nTrack adoption, utilization, customer res...","description_format":"text","description_chars":20086,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United 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