Description

OVERVIEW

The Product Guidance and Insights (PGI) Associate Manager leads the team, along with project work, to ensure products are designed to meet consumer needs and translate into production with their designed attributes, through the use of sensory analysis, consumer product understanding and the ability to connect the two.  The ideal candidate will have a passion for developing people and teams, deeply understanding consumers and applying sensory design principles to deliver the remarkable consumer experiences that maximize business impact.  This role will provide a global experience, supporting cereal brands, with an opportunity to interact and learn from consumers around the world.  This role will also lead critical experimentation on cross-functional teams to inform product optimization efforts and ensure remarkable product experiences across all Cereal Partners Worldwide (CPW) markets and to capture synergies across One Global Cereal.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Lead a team of sensory professionals, responsible for prioritization of work, mentoring, team development planning, and performance management.  Expectation that synergies will be captured across One Global Cereal (CPW and Big G)
• Partner with business and research teams to develop and execute experimentation and learning plans for innovation, core growth, waste elimination and quality
• Interpret consumer learnings, elevate key insights, provide actionable recommendations and guide business teams to next steps in the product development process and next learning activity
• Prioritization of projects against available budget and resources
• Lead projects through appropriate consumer, descriptive, and discrimination testing learning plans from exploration to confirmatory testing to build foundational product knowledge and consumer understanding
• Champion the consumer product voice and be accountable to ensure consumer empathy
• Educate and influence project teams using foundational product knowledge, business acumen, consumer research methodologies, and sensory technical skills

Requirements

KEY QUALIFICATIONS

• M.S. degree and 7+ years or PhD in Sensory Science, Food Science, Psychology, Statistics and 5+ years of related experience in sensory or consumer research working with project and/or business teams
• Experience in Ethnography, Psychophysics, Consumer Insights, Product Development, Flavor Chemistry, or Statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to uncover impactful insights from textual data, is a plus
• Experience planning and executing sensory and consumer guidance research in conjunction with broader R&D, Marketing and Consumer Insights functions
• Proven ability to apply sensory evaluation methods and interpret statistical analysis results of sensory evaluation data
• Fundamental understanding of applied statistical analysis, including design of experiments and multivariate analysis techniques
• Proven ability to interpret and communicate sensory and product insight findings with business and project teams
• Ability to effectively manage resources and leverage existing data to effectively lead and influence multiple projects
• Experimentation and learning mindset; ability to identify and bring in new capabilities