Job DescriptionJoin our North American Building Products' Innovation team as a Manager of Product Development.
This role leads teams through uncertainty to make better business decisions, reduce risk through learning, and deliver commercially impactful value-add.
Innovation at Worthington spans from launching new products, new business models and new customer experiences. It often begins with discovery work leading to painpoint identification (Stage Gate 0), subsequent solution development, then launch (Stage Gate 5). This role aligns leaders, customers, suppliers, manufacturing, and development teams toward a common outcome.
We seek a cross-functional leader who embraces change, thrives in ambiguity, and turns promising opportunities into measurable business value.
Responsibilities- Lead Innovation Programs: Lead cross-functional teams to discover high value opportunities and transform those into commercially successful product platforms. Reduce uncertainly and ensure customer desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility for successful, on schedule launches.
- Influence Organizational Alignment: Navigate ambiguity, secure resources, align stakeholders, and represent programs with executive leadership and customers. Ensure strategic business alignment throughout the development cycle and recommend project acceleration/pivot/pause/or termination based on evidence.
- Drive Innovation Discovery: Frame ambiguous customer and business opportunities into the critical assumptions that matter most, then lead rapid experimentation to reduce uncertainty before major investments are made.
- Coach High Performing Talent : Develop direct and cross-functional team members through coaching, candid feedback, and shared accountability
- Cultivate the Innovative Mindset: Build an environment where curiosity, experimentation, constructive debate, and customer learning becomes everyday behaviors.
- Performance Metrics: Define, track, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) related to business development and innovation efforts, ensuring goals are met or exceeded.
Critical Skills, Knowledge and Abilities- Leadership
- Empower Teams - Unlock the best of each development team by inspiring, navigating a clear path forward, and driving stage gate execution with excellence
- Influence Without Authority - Build relationships and credibility with local team members who may not directly report to this role.
- Resolve Conflict Constructively - Navigate any resistance, seeing opportunity to help move businesses by going slow early to go fast overall, taking team along.
- Coach and Develop Others - Lead and mentor a direct report and many in directs, while advancing project development management as a function.
- Innovation Execution
- Launch & elevate innovation - Apply and continuously improve this value-add process to increase learning speed, decision quality, and commercial outcomes.
- Human Centric Design and/or complex problem solving experience, including new product development (NPD) and non-product value add creation
- Rapid experimentation - Build & test hypotheses in an agile method to learn quickly and iterate again
- Opportunity framing - Create clarity where none exists. Work through high ambiguity, especially in front end "fuzzy" innovation and insights.
- Commercial acumen - Understand which levers impact a company's bottom line and which are proxies to success. Candidate is capable of separating the two and aligning resources accordingly
- Facilitation - Bring out the collective genius of a team and cut through the unknowns together to drive strong business decisions.
- People First
- Curious & learning mindset - Be willing and open to change approach, grow and learn from others. Seek to understand the core of an issue and value-at-stake before solving.
- Emotional intelligence - Has proven track record of building empathy with stakeholders.
- Communication - Is a clear communicator, tailoring messaging to audience and effectively gets to point.
Desired ExperienceDemonstrated success leading cross-functional teams through complex value-add programs involving uncertainty, changing requirements, and multiple stakeholders.
Education/Training Required - Minimum of 8 years of program management experience, with a proven track record of successfully leading programs in ambiguous, fast-paced environments.
- 2+ years of project management experience, formal or informal
- PMP certification or desire to work towards with company support
