Position Summary:
The Senior Portfolio Forecasting Specialist is the analytical engine of the Portfolio Strategy team, supporting long-range planning, enterprise growth strategy, and innovation portfolio assessment. This role is responsible for translating upstream ideas, inventions, and strategic initiatives into robust financial forecasts and evidence-based growth estimates that can be incorporated into the company's long-range plan. Partnering closely with the Senior Manager, Portfolio Strategy, this individual builds the quantitative foundation for evaluating growth initiatives-sizing opportunities, modeling adoption and economics, pressure-testing assumptions, and helping leadership understand which innovation bets can most credibly contribute to multi-year growth ambitions. The role combines strategic curiosity with financial rigor, data fluency, and structured problem-solving, bringing clarity to ambiguous opportunities and creating a consistent framework for comparing initiatives across the portfolio.
Key Responsibilities:
- Translate innovation concepts, upstream ideas, and strategic opportunities into initiative-level forecasts, business cases, and quantitative assessments that inform the enterprise long-range plan.
- Build forecasting models to estimate revenue, margin, investment requirements, timing, cash flow, and risk-adjusted value for new concepts, platforms, and growth initiatives.
- Quantify opportunity potential through market sizing, adoption curves, pricing scenarios, penetration assumptions, unit economics, and competitive context.
- Develop and maintain scenario analyses across base, upside, downside, and alternative assumptions to support portfolio planning and executive decision-making.
- Create portfolio-level rollups that show how combinations of initiatives contribute to long-term growth targets across planning horizons.
- Partner cross-functionally with Strategy, Finance, R&D, Commercial, and Innovation teams to align assumptions, identify dependencies, and improve the quality of opportunity assessments.
- Integrate financial, market, consumer, operational, and innovation inputs into a unified view of initiative potential and portfolio contribution.
- Establish consistent analytical frameworks, model standards, and assumptions libraries so initiatives can be compared on a common basis.
- Identify key value drivers, risks, bottlenecks, and capability gaps that could affect the expected performance of portfolio initiatives.
- Support enterprise investment decisions through sensitivity analysis, prioritization logic, and data-driven recommendations on sequencing and resource allocation.
- Prepare executive-ready analyses, dashboards, and presentations that connect complex forecasting and financial assessments to strategic implications and recommended actions.
- Continuously improve forecasting methodologies, templates, and tools to increase rigor, transparency, and decision quality within the Portfolio Strategy function.
Enterprise Impact:
- Higher confidence in long-range planning through disciplined, transparent, and repeatable initiative forecasting.
- Stronger linkage between upstream innovation activity and enterprise growth targets.
- Improved ability to compare diverse opportunities based on value, timing, risk, and strategic fit.
- Better investment choices through clearer visibility into assumptions, trade-offs, and portfolio contribution.
- A more credible analytical foundation for building a sustainable long-term growth engine.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree required in Finance, Economics, Business, Data Analytics, Engineering, Strategy, or a related quantitative field; advanced degree preferred.
- 5+ years of experience in forecasting, analytics, strategic finance, corporate strategy, portfolio analysis, commercial finance, or related analytical roles.
- Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous opportunities, upstream ideas, or early-stage concepts into structured assumptions, quantitative models, and decision-ready analyses.
- Strong analytical capability, including the ability to connect market opportunity, portfolio choices, and financial outcomes in a clear and defensible way.
- Experience building forecasting models, business cases, and scenario analyses to support planning, prioritization, and investment decisions.
- Advanced Excel and PowerPoint skills; experience working with multi-source, imperfect, or incomplete datasets to generate practical business insight.
- Strong communication, synthesis, and storytelling skills; able to explain complex analyses and assumptions to cross-functional stakeholders and senior leaders.
Preferred:
- Experience in innovation-driven, pipeline-driven, or strategy-led environments where new concepts or initiatives must be evaluated before launch or scale-up.
- Familiarity with long-range planning, portfolio strategy, innovation pipeline evaluation, or stage-gate processes.
- Exposure to market sizing, pricing analysis, demand forecasting, commercialization planning, or business case development.
- Working knowledge of BI and analytics tools such as Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, or similar platforms.
- Ability to integrate financial, market, consumer, and operational inputs into a unified opportunity assessment.
- Experience in industries with innovation portfolios, new product development, or long-horizon growth planning, such as food & beverage, consumer products, healthcare, life sciences, or technology.
Leadership Competencies:
- Enterprise and systems thinking.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and creating structure where it does not yet exist.
- Intellectual rigor with strong curiosity and sound judgment.
- Ability to influence and align cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority.
- Results-oriented with rigorous follow-through and high-quality execution.
- Strong collaboration skills and a bias toward clarity, transparency, and practical problem-solving.
The base salary for this position is between $75,000.00 and $95,000.00 per year. Actual compensation will depend on a variety of factors, including qualifications, experience, and location. This position may also be eligible for additional compensation and benefits, including an annual incentive bonus, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, PTO/FTO, and a 401(k) plan with company match.
