Director, Marketplace Development

Forget the kennel! DogVacay is the leading online service connecting pet owners with over 20,000 loving sitters across the U.S. and Canada.

This is an exciting opportunity to join an agile, entrepreneurial team and have real impact. Marketplace Development is a newly created team looking for ambitious leaders with a progressive history of accomplishment and rolling up their sleeves to deliver results. Joining this team in its early stages and as a vital contributor, you will have the opportunity to help shape your role and contribute to defining team objectives.

Reporting to the VP, Marketplace Development, the Director, Marketplace Development effectively leads efforts to ensure the success of the supply-side (i.e., half) of our marketplace, ensuring that guests find the type of host that they seek. The Director leads four elements on the host side of the business:

• Acquisition: Attracting and inspiring the right people
• Performance/Quality: Ensuring that our hosts provide the best experience for our guests and in a way consistent with our mission
• Retention: Keeping the right hosts in our community
• Monetization: Ensuring that the economics of our host offerings are optimized across stakeholders

This role manages a team to support these efforts and is also a cross-functional leader, working as a point person to achieve our mission and goals that incorporate sales, marketing/PR, data science/analytics, customer segmentation, product, and community.

You’ll make quick, data-driven decisions, with a bias toward action, and craft, execute, and iterate implementation plans with a path to scalability. The ideal person for this role is both analytical and creative, execution-focused, and makes smart decisions and course corrections to meet strategic objectives. You have experience leading teams to meet ambitious goals, including leading cross-functionally, have delivered quantitative results within a changing environment, and are passionate about the mission. You’re motivated by ambitious targets, and developing an evolving playbook to achieve those goals.

• Develop data-driven priorities, and establish KPIs and monitoring tools to continually assess host efforts, both overall and on an individual basis, to identify opportunities and necessary actions
• Quickly craft and execute implementation plans and pilots to address opportunities to acquire, retain, and improve the performance of hosts, while driving rapid improvement
• Work collaboratively to develop online and offline MVPs for new initiatives (digital and offline), test, iterate, and scale (this will often require testing new ideas through a manual process before incorporating into product changes)
• Mobilize the resources needed to execute (e.g., creating the business case, developing a detailed project management plan, establishing KPIs, onboarding contractors, evaluating/securing vendors)
• Optimize the economics of our host offerings
• Test, measure, and evaluate host monetization and host promotion programs to ensure the optimal economics (related experience a plus)
• Partner with marketing to identify and develop host acquisition objectives and define goals for execution and achievement
• Partner with product team to develop host product roadmap
• Lead efforts to test hypotheses and evaluate efforts by partnering with data science team to develop relevant analytics and insights
• Contribute substantively to executive decision-making and business insight through acute, relevant communications (e.g., emails, presentations, ad hoc reports)
• Develop and lead an evolving marketplaces development team with emphasis on analytics and execution

• BA/BS/Masters, preferably in Economics, Business, Engineering, or other quantitative focus
• 5 - 7 years’ progressive business experience encompassing strategy, analytics, product, marketing and/or business operations, including a quantitative/analytical role (e.g., management consulting, banking) and at least 3 years involved with day-to-day execution of operational objectives, achieving quantitative outcomes
• Experience in an entrepreneurial, start-up or high growth environment
• Strong Excel/data management, communications and influencing skills
• Experience with marketplaces or consumer internet is a plus
• Experience with monetization and promotions/incentives is a plus
• Involvement in leading and managing at least one direct report, preferably a small team

Personal Attributes:

• Ability to make good decisions quickly; able to bring clear thinking to situations involving ambiguity or lack of precedent
• Ability to partner with executives through highly relevant, timely communications
• Strong ownership mentality with a no-excuses mindset to overcoming obstacles and delivering results
• Focused on quality, output driven, proactive
• Extreme hustler and constantly pushing oneself to do better
• Thrives in a fast-paced, constantly changing startup environment
• Ability to multi-task and guide a team to do the same with extreme meticulousness
• Customer and data-driven decision mentality
• Natural leader who communicates well and can influence at all levels
• Team player who will do what it takes to support the mission
• Intellectually curious and want to make the world better; you enjoy solving puzzles and big problems
• You love dogs and people
• You have empathy and can build rapport with a diverse non-professional customer base