Director, Innovation Programs & Design Operations

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Job description

Job Description

The Opportunity:

Named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2024, Mattel is just getting started in driving our portfolio of leading family entertainment franchises to new heights. The Director, Innovation Programs and Design Operations designs and manages strategic and operational capabilities for Mattel's Design team that enable breakthrough creativity and accelerate profitable growth. This is a leadership role which requires capability to blur the lines between strategy and creative, and to design new business solutions in support of Mattel's creative community. This leader will oversee two critical and complementary teams:

Mattel's Innovation Programs team designs and leads proprietary workshops, trainings, and events, and progresses multi-faceted, multi-year external creative partnerships. Our work is grounded in a deep understanding of our consumers' needs and leverages the principles of Human Centered Design. We strengthen Mattel's internal innovation pipeline through amplifying impactful creative collaboration opportunities, upskilling the design community and progressing Mattel's capabilities supporting strategic topics like AI and Sustainability.

Mattel's Design Operations team is responsible for driving the effectiveness and efficiency of the Global Design organization including program management, process optimization, budgeting and resource alignment, tracking key analytics and KPIs, and creating impactful departmental-level communications and touchpoints.

What Your Impact Will Be:

For Design team, support annual planning and defining departmental goals/key actions processes, ensuring that strategic projects tie to broader organizational and team goals. Own departmental key milestones and internal communications. Support key change management initiatives

Operationalize events and programming that strengthen Mattel's internal Innovation pipeline. Drive engagement and impact of cross-functional workshops and departmental events and continuously examine results to identify ways to operate more effectively

Lead Mattel's AI for Design roadmap and drive meaningful partnerships and trainings to drive adoption of new tools

Develop case studies and best practices to progress capabilities across enterprise. Identify ways to scale and broaden communication to maximize organizational impact

Serve as an active facilitator for executive-level strategic workshops with internal and sometimes external partners. Ensure strategic workshops drive to outcomes

Act as an operational liaison between Design and Consumer and Business Insights teams, championing a consumer-centric mindset. Collaborate on Innovation insights / learning agenda to uncover breakthrough ideas

Drive alignment across multiple business functions, including Global Brand Teams, Marketing, Global Supply Chain, Finance, Commercial, IT, and HR. Serve as a crucial bridge between Design and cross-functional teams, with the goal of alleviating the operational demands on creative stakeholders

Improve data availability and usage for reporting and dashboards to enable data-driven decision-making across teams

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