Manager, Innovation
Job Description
As the Senior Manager, Innovation, you will be responsible for building and operating a high-velocity innovation engine that drives repeatable, profitable growth.
Sitting at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and commercial performance, this role owns the full lifecycle of innovation — from identifying opportunities to testing, scaling, and optimizing — with a clear focus on speed, business impact, and operational feasibility.
This role is accountable for turning ideas into measurable outcomes, ensuring every initiative is grounded in a clear revenue hypothesis, executed with discipline, and evaluated with rigor.
Core Responsibilities
Innovation Pipeline & Cadence Ownership
- Own the end-to-end innovation pipeline — from ideation through test, scale, and post-analysis
- Establish and operate a repeatable innovation cadence (monthly tests, quarterly launches)
- Maintain a live pipeline of concepts
- Balance core, seasonal, and disruptive ideas to drive both short-term performance and long-term growth
Commercialization & Revenue Accountability
- Define a clear revenue hypothesis for every initiative, including expected incremental traffic, mix impact, and margin implications
- Partner with Finance and Commercial to model scenarios and evaluate tradeoffs
- Ensure all initiatives align with enterprise financial and strategic guardrails
- Measure and report performance against defined business outcomes, not just activity
Speed to Market & Test-and-Learn Discipline
- Own time from concept? test? scale, with clear expectations on speed and iteration
- Lead a structured test-and-learn agenda tied to key business questions (pricing, bundling, occasions, product innovation)
- Rapidly iterate based on performance data and real-time feedback
- Ensure insights are translated into actionable decisions, not just observations
Success Criteria, Cannibalization & Decision Discipline
- Define clear success metrics and kill criteria for every initiative
- Assess incremental impact vs. cannibalization and adjust strategy accordingly
- Make timely decisions to scale, iterate, or discontinue initiatives
- Avoid accumulation of low-performing or overly complex offerings
Cultural Signal Integration (PAC)
- Leverage Platforms, Algorithms, and Culture (PAC) signals to identify emerging trends and opportunities
- Translate cultural insights into testable product and campaign ideas
- Maintain a forward-looking pipeline informed by real-time consumer behavior and trends
- Ensure brand stays head of, not behind, cultural moments
Cross-Functional Execution & Scalability
- Partner with Brand, Digital, Operations, Culinary, Supply Chain, and Analytics to bring innovations to life
- Ensure all initiatives are operationally executable at scale across restaurants
- Identify and mitigate execution risks early in the process
- Align innovation with restaurant realities and franchisee economics
Continuous Improvement & Portfolio Optimization
- Develop and manage innovation scorecards tied to traffic, mix, margin, and adoption
- Lead structured postmortems that drive clear decisions and future improvements
- Apply learnings from past initiatives to improve future performance
- Manage innovation as a portfolio, optimizing across multiple initiatives simultaneously
WHAT YOU'LL NEED
- Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Innovation, or a related field required
- MBA or advanced degree strongly preferred, especially with a focus on strategy, innovation, or consumer insights
- 8–10+ years of experience in marketing, brand strategy, innovation, or related fields
- Experience within QSR, restaurant, retail, or consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries strongly preferred
- Demonstrated track record of leading end-to-end initiatives—from insight generation through execution and scaling
- Preferred (not required): certifications in Design Thinking, Agile Marketing, or Innovation methodologies (e.g., IDEO, Scrum, Lean Startup) People skills
- Strong experience with marketing analytics and insights platforms (e.g., Tableau, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics)
- Experience with test-and-learn frameworks, A/B testing tools, and experimentation platforms
- Familiarity with CRM and digital marketing ecosystems (e.g., Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, paid media platforms)
- Comfort working with consumer research tools and methodologies (qualitative and quantitative)
- Proficiency in Microsoft Office and presentation tools (PowerPoint) to synthesize and communicate ideas clearly
- Strong strategic thinking with the ability to connect consumer insights to business outcomes
- Highly collaborative with proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without direct authority
- Excellent storytelling and communication skills—able to sell ideas and bring stakeholders along the journey
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and leading through change in a fast-paced environment
- High level of curiosity, creativity, and willingness to challenge the status quo
- Strong project management skills with the ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously
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