Director, New Experience - Product Design and R&D

About Four Seasons:

Four Seasons is powered by our people. We are a collective of individuals who crave to become better, to push ourselves to new heights and to treat each other as we wish to be treated in return. Our team members around the world create amazing experiences for our guests, residents, and partners through a commitment to luxury with genuine heart. We know that the best way to enable our people to deliver these exceptional guest experiences is through a world-class employee experience and company culture.         
At Four Seasons, we believe in recognizing a familiar face, welcoming a new one and treating everyone we meet the way we would want to be treated ourselves. Whether you work with us, stay with us, live with us or discover with us, we believe our purpose is to create impressions that will stay with you for a lifetime. It comes from our belief that life is richer when we truly connect to the people and the world around us.

About the location:

Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts is a global, luxury hotel management company. We manage over 120 hotels and resorts and 50 private residences in 47 countries around the world and growing. Central to Four Seasons employee experience and social impact programming is the company’s commitment to supporting cancer research, and the advancement of diversity, inclusion, equality and belonging at Four Seasons corporate offices and properties worldwide. At Four Seasons, we are powered by people and our culture enables everything we do.

Director, New Experience - Product Design and R&D

The Director of New Experience, Product Design and R&D will provide clear accountability and leadership across all stages of the hotels & resorts, and line of business customer journeys.  This entails managing three separate teams and disciplines: product management of new experiences (i.e. Yacht); product design; research and development and digital customer experience.

This role will provide oversight and ownership of growing Guest Satisfaction across digital products and platforms.

This role will provide oversight of the entire Four Seasons Digital Product and integrated service Ecosystem, and will lead and govern the creation of new experiences and platforms (Yacht, Chat Commerce etc.)

As the Four Seasons digital organization matures, this role is expected to grow scope and oversight beyond guest-facing interfaces into staff-facing interfaces

This role will collaborate closely across the business including but not exclusively to Digital Performance; Residential; Lines of Businesses; Global Hospitality; Customer Experience; Loyalty & Insights; Technology Innovation and Data; etc. to build world-leading digital products and integrated, omni-channel guest experiences

With respect to the New Experience portfolio—particularly the Yacht business unit—this role will be responsible for the development and ongoing management of the Yacht digital experience across our guest-facing platforms including web, mobile app, chat, on-ship tablets etc., accountable for the performance of these products. This role will create, own and groom the Yacht digital product roadmap: leading from conception, design, planning, implementation and launch.

What You’ll Be Doing:

Product Design

• Prioritize guest / staff experience over internal business structure.
• Integrate across the organization to drive a cohesive Seamless experience for guests, patrons and customers across the entire online and offline ecosystem.

Customer Experience

• Conduct business performance reviews.
• Conduct Monthly, Quarterly Stakeholder management meetings.
• Analyze CX scores, guest behaviour based on product usage and satisfaction.
• Identify forward looking guest behaviour trends.
• Generate insights that lead to new product features closing performance gaps.

Innovation

• Develop the Product Experience roadmap across the Four Seasons ecosystem.
• Think to the future and generate leading ideas.
• Design product innovations and new features.
• Lead Product Design to shape the future of Seamless Shopping.

What You Bring:

• Bachelor’s degree in business required.
• 10+ years of experience in a fast-paced environment, managing vendors, and senior level relationships with joint partnerships.
• Proven track record in delivering best-in-class digital experiences and product.
• Experience in digital product management, ecommerce, UX/design and development.
• Experience working under Scrum/Agile environments.
• Expertise in grooming and prioritizing product backlogs of large, consumer-facing digital products and services.
• Prior experience working with Agile/Scrum frameworks.
• Prior ecommerce experience an asset.
• Knowledge of Front-end development and mobile app development technologies.
• Knowledge in SQL, relational and non-relational databases.
• Knowledge in working with REST APIs and JSON objects.
• Knowledge in working with Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Firfebase, Google Data Studio
• Familiar with accessibility and privacy laws (ADA, AODA, WCAG, GDPR, CASL, CCPA, PIPL).
• Knowledge of business and marketing practices highly desired.
• Strong understanding of Ecommerce best practices; A/B testing; and analytics platforms.
• Strong understanding of User experience and Digital Product Design.
• Strong understanding of Scrum/Agile development methodologies.
• Proficiency in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Figma, InVision, Canva, Keynote, and Adobe Creative Cloud required.

Key Skills/ Who You Are:

• Ability to deal professionally, courteously and effectively, with all levels of management and other internal and external business contacts.
• Takes initiative to solve problems and deal with unexpected issues and follow-up to completion.
• Ability to facilitate and lead challenging and sensitive discussions internally and externally.
• Productive self-starter who is flexible, co-operative and receptive to change.
• Proven track record of advancement and high performance.
• Strong understanding of front-end, back-end, and middlware software development on web, mobile app, and other platforms.
• Strong program management skills in delivering complex software, and operational projects.
• Delivery Success: Proven track record of taking a product from ideation through stakeholdering, planning, implementation and launch.
• Experience Minded: Focused on the guest, and designing experiences and products that best meet their needs during those moments that matter most.
• Problem Solver: An ability to quickly break down ambiguous problems no matter the context. The skill to identify root causes at pace, and synthesize an approach to problem investigation and resolution
• Analytical Mindset: An ability to interpret data in order to arrive at next level guest insights and translate into a roadmap of features, actions and hypothesis to validate with test and learn practice
• Communication & Storytelling: Skilled in the ability to construct experience narratives, deliver clear and concise presentations, and to confidently guide discussions / facilitate workshops
• Team Builder: A proven ability to lead and develop others especially junior resources.
• Create Buy-In: Develops strong relationships across all functions and management levels, generating continuous collaboration, iteration, input, and buy-in from others. 
• Proactive Self-Starter: Delivers results while managing multiple priorities with lean resources in a dynamic and ever-changing environment; resilient and can operate autonomously

Travel:

• 10-20%

This role will be a Hybrid working model, which will require 3 days per week in the Four Seasons Corporate Office located at 1165 Leslie Street, Toronto, Ontario #LI-Hybrid

Four Seasons is committed to providing employment accommodation in accordance with the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. If contacted for an employment opportunity, please advise Human Resources if you require accommodation.